In brief: Ukraine received Western weapons in quantities too small to transform the war but large enough for Russia to study and counter. The failure was not NATO’s lack of military potential, but the absence of a Western strategy for Ukrainian victory.
It is always disappointing to discover that Wunderwaffen do not exist, especially when you have relied on them to win a war against Russia.
It is therefore unsurprising that the frustration implicit in former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhny’s claim that Russia found countermeasures to nearly every NATO weapon supplied to Ukraine since 2022 has made media waves.
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But his argument that NATO must now reinvent itself raises a question: what exactly for?
On the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, neither the US nor NATO showed much willingness to confront Russia directly. Western officials understood perfectly well that Moscow’s demands, which included reversing NATO’s post-Soviet enlargement, were a negotiation strategy designed to fail.
Nevertheless, Washington continued holding talks with Russia behind closed doors. Then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva in January 2022, though in vain.
But was NATO particularly concerned about defending Ukraine?
My conversations at the time were revealing. One senior NATO official told me that he did not believe a full-scale invasion would occur and expected another escalation in the Donbas instead – a scenario to which, quite frankly, I sensed little serious objection.
Nothing I heard during my reporting and travels subsequently that year suggested that the Alliance was especially concerned about its own security. With the exception of NATO’s eastern flank which did not wish for Kyiv to fall, the Alliance itself chose the strategy of staying away from the immediate massacre and remained reluctant to provide Ukraine with what officials described as lethal weapons rather than defensive assistance.