lOn August 26, Ukraine once again suffered a barbaric attack from Russia. Virtually the entire country was targeted by a hail of missiles and drones. The energy infrastructure has been destroyed. Russia’s stated goal is to terrorize the population and freeze Ukrainians out during the winter.
Since February 2022, Ukrainians have been loudly demanding that their skies be protected. In addition, Ukraine needs long-range weapons, as well as permission from its partners to attack Russian targets with them. But everything happens as if we in the West continue to consider this war as an external theater.
However, the hybrid war waged by Russia against Western democracies has already had unprecedented effects: massive cyber attacks, the organisation of a system of migratory pressure on the European Union, targeted assassinations in Europe, energy blackmail, manoeuvres to destabilise Western political life, an aggressive policy of overthrowing French influence in Africa, and financing all groups opposed to democracy, both in Germany and New Caledonia. Moreover, the Kremlin has not hidden since 2021 the fact that its aim was to stop NATO from hosting the countries that have joined it since 1999, from Poland to the Baltic states, from Hungary to Romania.
The European Union currently spends less than 0.1% of its wealth on military support for Ukraine. There is therefore an urgent need to radically change our stance. We do not push back totalitarian and genocidal dictatorships through a policy of avoiding confrontation, especially when we are more powerful. The most effective solution, supported by France, to end Russian aggression is to integrate Ukraine into NATO from 2025 at the next summit in The Hague.
red line
Until now, certain countries such as the United States and Germany have opposed it to avoid “escalation” and why “NATO cannot integrate a country whose borders are in dispute”Both arguments have been deconstructed by leading NATO experts, from Petr Pavel, the current Czech president, to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former secretary general of the Atlantic Alliance, and Kurt Volker, former US ambassador to NATO. For them, the escalation is already at its peak on the Russian side. When a country has been bombing civilian populations on a daily basis for thirty-six months, including children’s hospitals, we do not see how the West would raise the stakes by protecting a country under attack. On the contrary, the decision to integrate Ukraine into NATO would put an end to the grey areas that are so attractive to dictators.
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