The NATO countries assured on Wednesday that Ukraine could count on their support “as long” as necessary in the face of the “cruelty” of Moscow, which for its part denounced the future enlargement of the Alliance to Sweden and to Finland, deemed “aggressive” and “destabilizing”.
“Ukraine can count on us for as long as it takes,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the Atlantic Alliance summit meeting until Thursday in Madrid.
In a joint statement, NATO member countries announced a new plan to help kyiv through the “delivery of non-lethal military equipment” and aimed at “improving Ukraine’s defenses” against cyberattacks.
“Russia’s appalling cruelty is causing immense human suffering and mass displacement, disproportionately affecting women and children,” they wrote, saying Russia bore “full responsibility for this humanitarian catastrophe.” .
With the announcements from Madrid, “NATO has proven that it can take difficult but essential decisions”, welcomed the head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kouleba, on Twitter, welcoming the “lucid position” of the organization. on Russia and its “strong position” on Ukraine.
Invited a few hours earlier to speak to the leaders of the Alliance by videoconference, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, had asked for increased military and financial support to enable Ukraine to resist against “Russian artillery” .
“Significant threat”
The leaders of the NATO countries, who adopted a new strategic roadmap at the Madrid summit, described Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to the security of the allies and to peace” in the Eurozone. Atlantic.
“We cannot rule out the possibility of an attack on the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the allies”, they say in this document, which had not been revised since 2010 and whose last version described Moscow as a “partner strategic”.
This new roadmap also evokes for the first time the “challenges” posed by China. “Beijing’s” declared ambitions and its coercive policies challenge our interests, our security and our values, “said the document.
Faced with the Russian threat, NATO member states on Wednesday endorsed a reinforcement of their military presence on the eastern flank of the Alliance, which will also increase the number of its high-readiness forces to more than 300 000 soldiers.
“This is the most important reorganization of our collective defense since the Cold War,” said Jens Stoltenberg, referring to a “pivotal moment” in the history of the Atlantic Alliance, created in 1949.
“We are there” and “we are proving that NATO is more necessary than ever”, insisted the American president, Joe Biden, who announced for his part a reinforcement of the American military presence throughout Europe. especially in the Baltic States.
Turkish veto lifted
The Madrid summit was also an opportunity to officially launch the accession process for Sweden and Finland, which decided to join NATO in reaction to the Russian offensive in Ukraine, breaking with a long tradition of no – military alignment.
This membership has so far been blocked by Turkey, a member of NATO since 1952, which accused Stockholm and Helsinki in particular of harboring militants of the Kurdish organization PKK, which Ankara considers “terrorist”.
But after long negotiations, Turkey gave its agreement on Tuesday evening to the entry into NATO of these two Nordic countries, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan having estimated that he had obtained their “full cooperation” in his fight against the PKK. .
This enlargement of NATO to the two Nordic countries, whose formal entry must be ratified by the parliaments of the 30 member states and could take several months, aroused the anger of Moscow on Wednesday.
This is “a deeply destabilizing factor for international affairs”, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Riabkov, who denounced an “aggressive” movement towards Russia.
In a press release, Russian diplomacy also threatened Norway with reprisals, accusing this NATO member country of blocking the transit of goods to Russians settled on a Norwegian Arctic archipelago, Svalbard.
“If Putin was a woman”
Vladimir Putin, who had justified the offensive against Ukraine in particular by the fear of a new enlargement of the Alliance to this country, “hoped for less NATO on its western front”, but “he was completely mistaken » : « he gets more NATO », launched the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, after the agreement reached in Madrid.
These diplomatic advances have not prevented Ukraine from continuing to pay a heavy price on the ground, with new deadly strikes against civilians reported by the authorities on Wednesday, particularly in the regions of Mikolaiv (south) and Dnipro (center- is).
The bombings came two days after a strike that ripped through a crowded shopping mall in Kremenchuk, 330 kilometers southeast of kyiv, leaving at least 18 people dead and around 40 missing, according to the Ukrainian government.
The pro-Russian administrations installed by Moscow in the territories of southern Ukraine conquered since the invasion of Russia also multiplied announcements on Wednesday on the integration of these regions into Russia.
In Kherson, a first Russian bank has thus opened to finance the defense sector, while a civil status service obeying “Russian standards” has been set up to register births, deaths and celebrate weddings.
Despite these announcements, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said on Wednesday that Russia had “failed on all its major objectives” from a military point of view.
Russian troops only advance “a few hundred meters over several days”, at a “massive cost” for Moscow, he assured in an interview with LBC radio, estimating the number of soldiers at “25,000”. Russians killed since the beginning of the conflict.
A report attributed by Boris Johnson to the “male toxicity” of Vladimir Putin. “If Putin were a woman, […] I really don’t think he would have embarked on this crazy macho war,” said the British Prime Minister on German television channel ZDF.