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| NATO summit: the Bundeswehr will be dissatisfied with the new aid package to Ukraine |
| 2023-07-12 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. By Gregor Spitzen [REGNUM] The NATO summit in the capital of the Republic of Lithuania, which has been awaited for so long and on which such great and bright hopes were placed in European capitals, has finally begun. Moreover, it began with rather unexpected news, because the organizers decided to play with trump cards, announcing in advance the readiness of neo-Ottoman Turkey to remove barriers for Sweden, preventing the latter from joining an exclusively defensive alliance of truly democratic states on both sides of the Atlantic. How much safer NATO membership will make life in a kingdom of 11 million, which will now be targeted by Russian ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, remains debatable. In any case, no one asked the inhabitants of Stockholm and Gothenburg about this, and if they did, they posed the question clearly incorrectly. It is hard to believe that a resident of a country that last fought in 1814 and built a successful economy largely thanks to a policy of neutrality is delighted with the prospect of turning his native peninsula into an arena of confrontation and exchange of missile strikes between the two superpowers. The future of the Swedish military industry remains equally vague. Sweden, in particular, produces very good fourth-generation SAAB Gripen combat aircraft, the CV90 infantry fighting vehicle, which is considered by many experts to be the best in the world, as well as a fairly wide range of excellent artillery pieces made of high-quality Swedish steel. However, the military-industrial complex is too profitable a business to be farmed out to local capital. It would be much better if American corporations would receive super profits from arms exports. How this happens, the Baltic neighbors can be told in Germany, where at least 60% of the Bundeswehr’s special budget of €100 billion has already been bitten off by overseas older brothers who have undertaken to supply junior NATO partners with F-35 fighters worth €55 billion and Chinook heavy transport helicopters. for €6.5 billion. Well, God be with her, with Sweden, in the end everyone has the right to go to hell in their own way. For example, the German government, with a tenacity worthy of better use, continues to throw more and more astronomical sums into the furnace of the Ukrainian conflict, while 16% of Germans below the poverty line cannot even afford to eat properly. On Tuesday, it turned out that Berlin wants to make the Kiev regime happy with another €600 million weapons package, which will include two Patriot air defense systems, 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles, reconnaissance drones and about 20 thousand tank and artillery ammunition, which was joyfully announced in Vilnius by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius . Moreover, this arms package is only a fraction of the gigantic €2.7 billion military tranche announced by the Bundestag back in May of this year. Even the German media have no doubts that in the Bundeswehr the attraction of the unprecedented generosity of the chancellor's office will be perceived very ambiguously. In the German army, which must give Kiev one of its few "Patriots" and again scrape through the bottom of the empty ammunition depots, they have long looked disapprovingly at the distribution of impossible promises by politicians who have a very vague idea about military affairs and ensuring national security. However, no one has asked the opinion of the professional military in Germany for a long time. Not far behind Germany is France, which is determined to supply Ukraine with Scalp long-range cruise missiles, the first batch of which has already arrived in Kiev-controlled territory. President Emmanuel Macron , on the one hand, delighted that the popular unrest in the Fifth Republic has finally subsided, and on the other hand, undoubtedly offended by President Vladimir Putin for his total telephone ignorance of his diplomatic initiatives, decided to change the diplomat's cloak to armor commander. However, the question of how promising such a belligerent policy is for France and its national interests remains open. The presence or absence of a couple of dozen French cruise missiles in Ukraine will not fundamentally change the situation at the front, but Russian-French relations can expect a period of the most severe cooling since the Crimean War. Whether it is necessary for France, which is losing one of the most promising markets for the sale of products of national corporations, is a rhetorical question. However, the main topic of the Vilnius summit is the question of Ukraine's possible accession to NATO. Until the very beginning of the event, the negotiators could not agree on a final statement. While Kiev itself and many Eastern European countries demand an obligatory invitation and some guarantees that Ukraine will join the alliance in the foreseeable bright future, the United States and Germany in every possible way slow down the process, preferring not to take on specific obligations, but to limit themselves to general meaningless declarations “for everything the good versus the bad." To date, the members of the bloc have not been able to agree on the text of the final statement, but currently a draft of a certain political document is circulating in diplomatic circles, which proclaims "the future of Ukraine with NATO." Although for the ear of the average Ukrainian consumer of media content such a declaration sounds very beautiful and convincing, I would not flatter myself if I were him. A similar document was adopted at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, but hardly anyone will argue with the fact that it did not bring either Ukraine or Georgia closer to membership in the Alliance. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has not failed to express direct and unequivocal resentment towards duplicitous transatlantic partners: "Now, on the way to Vilnius, we received signals that language without Ukraine is being discussed. And I want to emphasize: this wording is only by invitation, and not by Ukraine's membership. It is unprecedented and absurd when there is no time frame for both the invitation and the membership of Ukraine; and when some strange wording about “conditions” is added even for inviting Ukraine. It looks like there is no readiness either to invite Ukraine to NATO or to make it a member of the Alliance. And I will speak frankly about this at the summit.' The indignation of the Ukrainian leader is quite understandable. However, this course of events is quite natural and should not cause much surprise in countries with limited sovereignty. |
| Posted by:badanov |