I mean… non of these countries have a particularly good track record of following laws or “commitments.” This is political posturing.
Yeah, no, this is absolutely meaningless. None of this has any relevance as long as the current conflict is still going, and nobody knows what the situation in Ukraine will be when it does end. And everything they promise in this statement to do in the future for Ukraine they have already been doing and Ukraine is still losing. None of those measures worked to stop Russia doing what they judged needed to be done.
But you know what would work to deter Russia? Actually sitting down to talk to them and taking their stated vital interests seriously. And without trying to pull one over on them and scam them for the third time. And unfortunately, since that is still too radical a step for Europe at the moment, the present course will continue unabated, to the detriment of Ukraine and of Europe, not so much to Russia.
What I was expecting to see was a guarantee that they would be joining the war with their own militaries. Since they are not then this is just more of the same and amounts to posturing imo.
It’s not posturing. It’s a commitment to increase defense spending which will then be used as excuse to impose austerity and budget cuts this year (“it’s the Russians, not your own capitalists who are doing this to you”), and preparing the countries for shock therapy in the very near future. Everything is going exactly as planned.
If anything, this just forces Russia to push to the end.
Quite the opposite of of a dissuasion, IMO.
“Future” being the key word. All this is telling the Russians is that they have to finish this. Even if they just keep shelling an enemy that’s otherwise given up the conflict must legally continue forever or until Russia’s security is satisfied.
In my opinion these treaties are little but a way to attempt to delude the Ukrainians into thinking they’ll actually get into NATO and that the west actually cares about them so they continue to throw bodies against the Russians as fodder.
Anyways this says nothing. Military assistance as deemed proper basically is what it says, it says they get a conference with these nations and the nations may if they deem it appropriate give them military gear, intelligence sharing, slap sanctions on Russia basically everything they’ve been doing so far but again at a future date. It offers no iron-clad commitments that they’ll pour troops into Ukraine. That’s certainly the threat and they -could- end up doing that in future based off this given Ukraine couldn’t win on its own. Then again they could ignore it, send token assistance, or back down and run away.
Do they want Russia to conquer all of Ukraine so it can’t join NATO or…?
Remember when people thought those panicked articles in NYT meant NATO/Ukraine would quietly roll back to the original Russian demands?
Good times.
