While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in the US to secure the support of his ally, international risk advisor Stéphane Audrand believes that massive support is needed for Ukraine to avoid prolonging the conflict.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington today to try to convince his counterpart Joe Biden, and especially the American Congress, to invest further in support against Russia. Among the demands is the core of the matter: new weapons, numerous and powerful. In Europe, Poland announced yesterday the end of its arms supplies to Kiev, then said the country would continue to honor “previously agreed” deliveries.
>> War in Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington to maintain his support
Stéphane Audrand, co-signatory of an article published in La Croix entitled “Europeans must increase their production of military equipment”, believes that international risk advisor and reserve officer Stéphane Audrand considers rapid and massive support to Ukraine to be essential because “ in the long run we would lose”.
franceinfo: Should we pick up the pace and increase support for Ukraine?
Stephane Audrand: Yes, because it is a lesson from the industrial wars of the 20th century: if they do not end very quickly, they continue and can only be solved by an increasing increase and mobilization of resources and production. And Russia is in the process of doing this, certainly with all the problems it has with corruption, inefficiency and obsolescence, but we know that the Russians have now returned to their previous levels of missile production. -War. They receive help from China, which supplies 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 that will allow them to hold out. So Russia is in this logic of increasing mobilization and we, on the other hand, are resorting to our stocks, and that’s all. Apart from ammunition, there is a European program, but when it comes to vehicles, when it comes to long-term military resources, it is difficult to see where the Europeans are.
Is there now a danger that if you don’t give much – and more than before – you’ll have to keep giving for a long time without any guarantee of success?
Quite. There is a danger that the conflict will drag on or that Russia will even manage to gain the upper hand over Ukraine after two, perhaps three years. In this case, a Russian victory would be a catastrophe for the European model. On the one hand, because there would have been a violent change of borders and the conquest of a sovereign country, and on the other hand, because we would end up with a reinforced Russia on our borders. So yes, in the long run we would lose.
Does this mean that the sanctions policy against Moscow has failed in some way since the beginning of this crisis?
Clearly. I think we overestimated the impact of the sanctions. In order for them to work, they would have had to rely much more heavily on hydrocarbons from the start, which we were unwilling to do because we didn’t want to let our own economies collapse. And the sanctions that Russia had been preparing for since 2014, because we had already imposed a first set of sanctions that had aroused Russia’s distrust given certain vulnerabilities. And the 2022 ones, while very important, were undeniably not enough to block the Russian war effort. And today, given all these problems and all these inefficiencies, the Russian war effort is directed against Ukraine and in the long term there is a danger that it will dominate.