With Russia on the offensive, Ukraine will have to hold out alone until the European summer

Last summer’s Ukrainian military offensive barely made any progress AND Russia is preparingaccording to all the information available to European intelligence, to be launched in the coming weeks or months, when the mud has dried, a new offensive.

Ukraine desperately asks for help to contain a front of over 1,000 kilometers. It needs hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of howitzers for the artillery pieces it receives, it needs ammunition and anti-aircraft weapons, it needs drones, he needs everything.

But European arsenals are starting to empty after two years of war and the European military industry is unable to produce what Ukraine needs while in Washington the Republicans They keep American aid paralyzed.

The European summit on Thursday and Friday ended with good words for Ukraine, but good words will be pretty much the only thing Kiev will get until at least June. In the coming months, Ukraine will be alone against Russia. Because all the promises made coincide in the month of June and until then there is nothing.

What aid will reach Ukraine in June?

The Czech Republic succeeded, by asking for half the planet, collect 800,000 122mm artillery shells (Russian caliber) and 155 millimeters (NATO caliber). The Czechs will buy it and ship it to Ukraine. The bill, of almost 1.5 billion dollars, It is paid between 18 European countries. But they won’t arrive before June.

the same month the first fighter planes will arrive (F16 supplied by the Dutch, who are already receiving the modern F35). The French and British arsenals of medium and long range missiles are at a minimum and the successors, who should have been German (the envied Taurus) They don’t have permission from Berlin go to Ukraine.

The leaders of the European institutions They repeat that Ukraine will be helped “as long as necessary”, but with an industry unable to keep up with the war in Ukraine, Governments do not want to completely empty their arsenals. The Frenchman Emmanuel Macron has been trying for weeks, with the support only of Estonia and Poland, to change the pace of the Europeans by saying that sending troops should be studied if the Ukrainians fail to hold the front.

They weren’t going to be combat troops at first troops for rearguard duties allow Ukraine can bring more men to the front. Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and all the others They reject this idea. And the European chancellor, the Spanish-Argentine Josep Borrell, tried this week to tone down the rhetoric that some European national leaders have used in recent weeks. Just because war is possible does not mean it is neither probable nor imminent.

This week’s summit it also closes the door on the use of Russian Central Bank money stuck in a Belgian clearinghouse, Euroclear, to arm Ukraine.

There is more than 300 billion euros and the most the Europeans will go to is to allow the profits of that money (about 1% per year) to be used to pay for weapons for Ukraine. And that money, as confirmed by the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, It won’t arrive until July. This plan must be approved unanimously and, as always in this war, Hungarian Orban sides with Vladimir Putin and announces that he will block it.

The third World War?

Thursday the summit linked by video with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj. The former actor turned wartime leader said this his men feel humiliated because they have to count every bullet they fire when they know that there are more of them in European arsenals than are sent.

These men are told that they arejust the front line of a Russian war against the rest of Europe, that if Ukraine falls behind, other countries will follow. Or, as Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas says, “if Russia wins the war World War III will begin”.

Most of the ammunition and new weapons, most of the financing, will arrive in Kiev after June. If Kiev, by then, remains under Ukrainian control.