While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in the United States to ensure the support of his ally, international risk consultant Stéphane Audrand considers that Ukraine must be massively supported so as not to see the conflict drag on.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington today to try to convince his counterpart, Joe Biden, and especially the American Congress, to further invest in support against Russia. Among the demands, the crux of the matter: new weapons, numerous and powerful. In Europe, Poland announced yesterday the end of its arms deliveries to kyiv, before specifying that the country will still honor the deliveries “previously agreed”.
>> War in Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington to maintain his support
Co-signatory of an article published in La Croix and entitled “Europeans must increase their production of military equipment”, international risk consultant and reserve officer Stéphane Audrand believes that it is imperative to quickly and massively support Ukraine , because “in the long term, we would lose”.
franceinfo: Should we step up the pace and increase support for Ukraine?
Stéphane Audrand: Yes because it is a lesson from the industrial wars of the 20th century: when they do not end very quickly, they last and they are only resolved by an increasing rise and mobilization of means and production. And that, Russia is in the process of doing it, certainly with all the problems it has with corruption, inefficiency, obsolescence, but we know that now the Russians have regained their previous level of missile production. -war. They have help from China which provides them with spare parts, dual-use goods and certainly not weapons, but the means to build more. They have this agreement with the North Koreans which will allow them to hold on. So Russia is in this logic of increasing mobilization and we, on the other hand, are drawing on our stocks and that’s about it. Apart from munitions, there is a European program, but for vehicles, for long-term military resources, it is difficult to see where the Europeans are.
Not giving a lot – and more than what has been done so far – now is the risk of having to continue giving for a long time, without any guarantee of success?
Quite. This is the risk that the conflict will drag on, or even that Russia will manage to gain an upper hand over Ukraine after two years, perhaps three years. In which case, a Russian victory would be a disaster for the European model. Both because there would have been a forcible modification of the borders, the conquest of a sovereign country, and then because we would end up with a reinforced Russia on our borders. So yes, in the long term, we would lose.
Does this mean that there is some form of failure of the sanctions policies carried out against Moscow since the start of this crisis?
Clearly. I think we have overestimated the impact of the sanctions. For them to work, they would have had to be much more massive on hydrocarbons from the start, which we were not ready to do because we did not want to collapse our own economies. And the sanctions, already since 2014, Russia had been preparing for them because we had already taken a first set of sanctions which had awakened Russian distrust in the face of certain vulnerabilities. And those of 2022, even if they were very important, it is undeniable, they were not sufficient to block the Russian war effort. And today, with all these problems and all these inefficiencies remaining, the Russian war effort is turning against Ukraine and there is a long-term risk that it will dominate.