Ukraine has a Germany problem again. Here’s how to fix it

Germany is going through some severe economic turbulence, but it remains more than rich enough to maintain funding for Ukraine.

Kyiv’s Kursk operation was aimed less at the battlefield than Berlin and other allies Marc ChampionNot for the first time, Ukraine is having problems with support from Berlin. It also has a France, US and even a UK problem. Taken together, they go a long way to explaining why President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the high-risk gamble of sending troops to fight in Russia, at a time when he had barely enough to hold the line at home.

It’s easy to pick on Germany, the nation that at first offered Ukraine just helmets to help defend itself against Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The “Zeitenwende” that Chancellor Olaf Scholz then boldly announced to transform German energy and security policies changed all that. But with this week’s Frankfurter Allgemeine report that the finance ministry plans to halve the budget for Ukraine aid next year and slash it further thereafter, Scholz’s “turning point” is looking a little more like a swerve.

Coming just after Berlin made public its issuance of an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian national accused of carrying out the September 2022 sabotage of the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, you might also think the reported cuts are payback. They aren’t, and not because the government says no decisions on cuts have yet been made. The answer’s much simpler: a dysfunctional coalition government and a finance minister wedded to absurdly restrictive budget rules.

The bottom line is that you can’t have a turning point that changes Germany’s business and security model without spending money. The country is going through some severe economic turbulence, but it remains more than rich enough to maintain funding for Ukraine, increase spending on defense production and attend to social properties at the same time.

No, this is much wider than a Germany problem, even if Berlin’s case seems egregious in that unlike some others, the government has ample fiscal headroom. The amounts in question are – contrary to populist rhetoric – minor; for Germany, €8 billion ($9 billion) next year, or 0.2% of gross domestic product. So this is less about lack of resources than political dysfunction, the rise of pro-Russia populists and a failure of will.  Zelenskiy’s Kursk offensive aims to change that.

Pleading poverty is just one failure. The unwillingness to recognize that Russian threats of unleashing a nuclear Armageddon were hollow and shouldn’t be allowed to obstruct arming Ukraine is another.

“We are now witnessing a significant ideological shift, namely, the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha,” Zelenskiy said in an annual address to the nation’s diplomatic staff this week, referring to the main Russian town Ukrainian forces have captured.

To drive his point home, Zelenskiy said the whole Kursk operation would have been unnecessary, had allies lifted restrictions on using their long-range missiles to strike Russia’s core advantages in firepower where they’re located, far behind the front lines. US ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles, and – respectively -- British, French and German Storm Shadow, SCALP_EG and Taurus cruise missiles would allow Ukraine to more effectively destroy bridges, arms depots and above all, the airfields from which Russian jets armed with glide bombs take off.

These weapons are among the most effective adaptations Russia has made since the beginning of the war. They are unguided bombs fitted with wings that weigh up to 1.5 tons; they’re being launched at Ukrainian forces at a rate of 130 to 150 a day, Mykola Bielieskov, a researcher at Kyiv’s National Institute for Security Studies, tells me. They are devastating, especially in conjunction with Russia’s still-overwhelming advantage in artillery shells.

Much attention in judging Zelenskiy’s Kursk gambit has, for good reason, focused on whether the move can force President Vladimir Putin to divert troops from the front lines of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. If so, the operation will have succeeded militarily, relieving pressure on a front that was slowly buckling.

So far that isn’t working. Russia has instead intensified attacks in the Donbas, while scraping together a motley crew of forces from elsewhere to halt the Ukrainian advance in Kursk. But the focus may in some ways be misplaced. If the Kursk offensive can – as Zelenskiy clearly hopes – galvanize allied support and arms supplies, while persuading Western leaders to lift restrictions on using of their long-range missiles against targets on Russian soil, he stands to achieve much more.

By neutralizing Russia’s key advantages Ukraine would be able to relieve pressure on its defenses even without Russia diverting troops. Kyiv also might be left with a small amount of territory to trade in future negotiations. That admittedly optimistic scenario would secure tactical military gains, as well as strategic ones with potential to affect the outcome of the war as a whole.

If Zelenskiy’s gamble fails to energize the West or even loosen restrictions on long-range weapons, those potential strategic gains will be lost. Ukraine will likely also lose the important transport hub of Pokrovsk in the Donbas, and Putin would be well on his way to conquering all of the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, whose annexation he declared just before invading. Ukraine would at some point have to sue for peace on terms that, as a similar deal in 2014 proved, would only embolden Putin to return to the fray later.

This doesn’t have to happen. True, Russia has fewer political challenges in sustaining the war, because Putin can control what the Russian public sees and hears, while as Stefan Meister, a specialist on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations puts it: “We’re in a different reality of rising populism.” That demands governments do a better job of showing their publics they have a viable plan to end the war — without letting Putin win.

Germany plays a special role in all this, because it has become Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of arms after the US, including some of the most effective, such as IRIS-T air defense system, and the 500-kilometer-range Taurus cruise missile it has yet to offer, for fear of triggering Russian escalation. Yet in his nightly address to the nation on Sunday, it was France, the UK and US that Zelenskiy called out for falling behind on promised arms deliveries.

All concerned, including Zelenskiy, know this war will end at the negotiating table. The question is on whose terms. It is up to Western leaders to at last define securing a strong negotiating position for Ukraine as victory, and put together the financial and military strategy to achieve that. They have the means, and they can start by lifting restrictions on those long-range missiles.

Credit: Bloomberg