Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: NY Times Editorial- Ukraine

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Europe Leaders Debate Aid to Ukraine, but Not Russia’s Transgressions

FEB. 9, 2015

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Uglegorsk, Russia

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Dominique Faget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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By SERGE SCHMEMANN

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MUNICH — It was at the venerable Munich Security Conference in 2007 that Vladimir Putin first sounded the resentful Cold War blast that now defines his foreign policy, bitterly accusing the United States of seeking a monopoly on global power. Subsequent Munich conferences were marked by desultory efforts to “reset” the relationship, to maintain the appearance at least of collegiality. All that was before Ukraine.

At the security conference this past weekend in a bitterly cold Bavarian capital, the talk in the hall packed with generals, defense ministers, lawmakers and senior politicians was not of Russia’s place in a European security order. It was about whether to send lethal arms to Ukraine to counter the military assistance that Russia supplies — and blandly denies supplying — to rebels in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.

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Although the deterioration in relations with Russia has been obvious for some time, the hostility on display in Munich was still striking, even shocking, to many Russia hands and veterans of such conferences. One Russian participant said she got chills listening to some of the speeches.

States bordering on Russia were referred to as “front-line states.” The familiar litany of self-pity and it’s-all-Washington’s-doing from Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov — once a friend to many in the hall — drew bursts of derisive laughter. And when a Russian legislator regarded as pro-Western tried to argue that Western views of Ukraine were superficial, Senator Lindsey Graham, who with Senators John McCain and Bob Corker was one of a chorus of hawkish Republican lawmakers at the conference — brusquely dismissed his comments.

This was the stormy background against which Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, launched what many see as an 11th-hour effort to negotiate an end to the fighting in Ukraine. Perhaps more important for her, she was also trying to forestall growing calls in the United States to start supplying defensive but lethal arms to Ukraine.

“The progress that Ukraine needs cannot be achieved by more weapons,” Ms. Merkel said again and again at the Munich conference. It is also the message she pressed during her visit to Washington on Monday.

Ms. Merkel addressed the security conference on Saturday, the day after she and President François Hollande of France, her partner in the negotiating initiative, had held talks in Kiev and Moscow. They and the leaders of Russia and Ukraine are tentatively scheduled to meet next in Minsk on Wednesday for what is expected to be the decisive moment of their current mission.

Details of what’s on the table are not known, and Ms. Merkel acknowledged that success was far from certain. But Senator Corker, a Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was not particularly receptive in his response: The chancellor, he said, was blocking America from giving Ukraine the arms it needs.

That is not the position of President Obama, and Secretary of State John Kerry fervently sought to persuade the conference that “there is no division, there is no split” between the United States and Germany on how to deal with Russia over Ukraine. Mr. Obama repeated that formulation on Monday after meeting with Ms. Merkel at the White House, but pointedly left the idea of lethal assistance on the table.

The United States is currently committed to provide training and nonlethal equipment (body armor and the like), and Mr. Obama has not shown enthusiasm for providing the communications equipment and arms to counter Russian artillery and radar that President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine is seeking.

The debate, however, which continued in the corridors and beer halls, goes beyond Ukraine’s military needs. On the eve of the meeting, a group of former ambassadors to NATO and Ukraine issued a report declaring that Ukraine represented the most serious security threat to the West since the Cold War. The West had to be prepared to send lethal assistance to Ukraine, they argued, both “to support Ukraine and to push back against Russia’s unacceptable challenge to the postwar European security order.”

Ms. Merkel’s deeply held counterargument, based on her roots in East Germany, is that East-West conflicts cannot be resolved militarily, and that if one negotiating approach fails, then another must be tried.

A more pragmatic argument against lethal assistance is that Ukraine and its military, in their utterly devastated state , are in no shape to deploy sophisticated weapons. A stronger argument is that President Putin would actually welcome an escalation since it would confirm his claim that the United States is pulling Kiev’s strings, and since his army could easily overcome any increase in Ukrainian military capability.

These debates will not be resolved any time soon. But however sore Mr. Lavrov may be at his drubbing in Munich, he would do his country a favor by reporting to his president that there was no debate in Munich this time about how Mr. Putin and his aggressive policies are perceived in the West.

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 10, 2015, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Europe Leaders Debate Aid to Ukraine, but Not Russia’s Transgressions. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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