US-European unity in the Ukraine war will be tested in winter

Welcome back. As winter approaches, the US and its European allies face a test. Can they maintain their united front against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and provide Kyiv with all the military, economic and political support it needs to sustain its struggle for independence? I’m at [email protected].

First, the results of last week’s poll. In response to the question whether Germany needs to do more to distance itself from China, some 70 per cent of you said yes, 18 per cent said the present balance was right and 12 per cent were on the fence. Thanks for voting!

Speaking by phone on Tuesday with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Emmanuel Macron of France agreed to hold an international conference in Paris on December 13 on assistance for Ukraine over the winter. The focus will be on electricity, water supplies and other critical infrastructure.

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With some 30 to 40 per cent of Ukraine’s power-generating capacity destroyed by Russian air attacks since the start of October, this is in principle a valuable initiative. Almost 5mn Ukrainians were without power on Friday. But the Paris meeting will also be important as a political signal that the west’s resolve to support Ukraine is undiminished.

However, there could be trouble ahead. We are already seeing signs that, in the US and some European countries, the commitment to support Ukraine over the long term is coming under pressure.

The US midterm elections

The first test is next week’s US midterms. Opinion polls indicate the Republicans are set to win control of the House of Representatives. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy suggested that, if this happens, it won’t be easy to secure future House approval for aid to Ukraine.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell quickly contradicted McCarthy, saying that in the upper chamber of Congress his party’s support for Ukraine would remain solid.

However, Ukraine’s concerns were further raised when liberal Democrats sent a letter to the White House, urging the Biden administration to explore “all possible avenues” to end the war, including “direct engagement with Russia”. They soon withdrew their letter, but a certain confusion lingers over the resilience of bipartisan support for Ukraine in Washington.

Among American voters, the willingness to help Ukraine appears to be holding up. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on October 10, 66 per cent support continuing US military aid — down from 73 per cent in late April.

As Keith Naughton argues in this article for The Hill, public support for Ukraine may be weaker than the polling indicates. Inflation and the cloudy economic outlook are the main concerns for Americans. National security and foreign policy are way down their list of priorities.

Imbalance between US and European aid

This matters because there’s growing impatience in Washington with the imbalance between the vast US military and financial effort on Ukraine’s behalf and the slower, smaller European response. This chart, prepared by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, highlights the gap:

An early critic of the Europeans was Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, a Republican. As Jeremy Shapiro observes in this commentary for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Marshall complained that “our Nato allies’ contributions have dropped off significantly, turning this essentially into a proxy war between the US and Russia”.

The plain fact is that, without US political leadership, strategic guidance and military supplies, the Europeans would have been very poorly placed to confront Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February. On this point, some expert comments in Judy Dempsey’s Strategic Europe piece for Carnegie Europe make for sobering reading.

For example, Mary Murphy at the University of Cork states:

The tepid nature of the EU’s foreign, security and defence capacity is simply not equipped to provide the kind of long-term multi-faceted support which the United States can deliver.

The Europeans’ relative military weakness is a longstanding problem, not easy to rectify quickly. From a Ukrainian perspective, it is harder to understand why the EU — one of the world’s richest, most advanced economic regions — is so slow in activating its financial resources. Ukraine estimates it will need $38bn next year in budgetary assistance, but the Europeans are still tinkering with their funding plans.

Cracks in European political support

By and large, European governments remain committed to helping Ukraine, and the most prominent critics tend to be on the far right and far left. But there are exceptions, and they need watching.

In Germany, for instance, Michael Kretschmer, the Christian Democratic premier of the state of Saxony, called this week for a diplomatic end to the war. He said Germany should then return to using Russian gas to meet its energy needs.

In late October, President Zoran Milanović of Croatia boycotted an international summit on Ukraine held in Zagreb, and said: “In the end, Americans and Russians will have to sit at the table because they are waging a proxy war over Ukraine.”

Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán regularly makes much the same point, though he came up with a typically outrageous formulation last month when he said “hope for peace goes by the name of Donald Trump”.

In Italy, pro-Russia and pro-peace sentiments are the hallmark of former premier Silvio Berlusconi and League leader Matteo Salvini — both of whose parties have just returned to government — and of Giuseppe Conte, another ex-premier. However, Giorgia Meloni, the new prime minister, is a firm supporter of aid to Ukraine.

As economic recession and the energy crunch start to grip Europe, the question is whether the continent’s leaders can summon the will to boost their economic and military support for Ukraine. Without such an effort, American frustration with Europe will surely grow.

More on this topic

Inside Orbán’s response to the war in Ukraine — an exposé by the investigative news outlet Direkt36 of Hungary’s close ties with Russia before and after the Kremlin’s invasion

Notable, quotable

“I am someone who likes to travel to countries where you are always warmly welcomed, no matter who you are . . . A World Cup must not be awarded to such countries that do not comply with the criteria” — Philipp Lahm, who captained Germany to victory in the 2014 World Cup, explains why he won’t attend this year’s tournament kicking off on November 20 in Qatar

Tony’s picks of the week

Singapore’s ruling People’s Action party is redoubling its efforts to defend the state’s conservative cultural status quo, but its popularity is in decline and its outlook is often at odds with the views of a more liberal, younger generation, the FT’s Mercedes Ruehl reports

The European Political Community, launched in Prague last month with 44 leaders in attendance, disguises the fact that one of Europe’s main difficulties is the dysfunctional Franco-German relationship, Roderick Parkes and Milan Nič write for the German Council on Foreign Relations think-tank