NATO used a summit meeting in Wales this week to underscore its pledge to defend its eastern flank. The alliance announced plans for a force of up to 5,000 troops that could mobilize within 48 hours to repel aggression against any of its members. The so-called spearhead force is sure to ease fears in Poland and the Baltics, since NATO’s existing “rapid” response team can take months.
Yet even as it reassured its eastern European members, NATO made clear that it won’t offer much more than moral support to Ukraine. At a press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen condemned Russian intervention in Ukraine. “Russia must stop its aggressive actions against Ukraine, withdraw its thousands of troops from Ukraine, and stop supporting the separatists,” he said.
For tangible help, Rasmussen said NATO would provide €15 million ($19.6 million) in aid to Ukraine for such nonlethal uses as cyberdefense, logistics, and rehabilitation of injured soldiers. To put that figure in perspective, consider that NATO member countries spend about $1 trillion a year on defense.
NATO, of course, has no obligation to aid a country not counted among its members. But the bigger worry is that pulling Ukraine closer to the alliance will only “ramp up the animosity” between Russia and the West, adding to tensions along the border with Russia, says Sarah Lain of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London.
Those tensions were highlighted on Friday when Estonia said one of its security officers had been abducted at gunpoint and taken into Russia near a border checkpoint. Russia said the officer was arrested while taking part in an undercover operation in the Pskov region of Russia, home to a military airborne division that appears to have sent troops to Ukraine.
NATO leaders are trying to avoid provoking Russia while “bolstering deterrence in a way that is unambiguous,” says Ian Lesser, senior director for foreign and security policy at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. The planned 48-hour response force is more than just a political gesture to nervous NATO members, he says. “It responds to a real operational need.”
Under a 1997 agreement, NATO promised not to station permanent forces in eastern Europe, instead relying on short-term rotations of small numbers of troops. Although NATO has a rapid-response force, it can take months to deploy fully. Besides the planned new spearhead force, NATO plans to step up troop rotations and stockpile more equipment, ammunition, and fuel at bases in potential battle zones. It also will beef up a headquarters in Poland that could direct operations in an emergency.
The goal is to make clear to potential aggressors “that engaging in offensive operations against NATO is not something they would wish to do,” British Gen. Adrian Bradshaw,the alliance’s deputy supreme commander, told reporters at this week’s summit.
Russia is reacting angrily. Alexander Grushko, Russia’s envoy to NATO, said the alliance’s plans would violate its agreements with Russia. Plans for some NATO countries to hold military drills in eastern Ukraine this fall are “a provocation,” he said on Rossiya 24 television on Friday.
Even so, Lain says, the bulking up of NATO defenses is unlikely to affect Russia’s actions in Ukraine: “Russia knows that the West isn’t going to war over Ukraine.”
