Once rock-solid, the support that Ukraine has gotten from its biggest backers for its fight against Russia is showing cracks. Political posturing in places like Poland and Slovakia, where a trade dispute with Ukraine has stirred tensions, and Republican reticence in the United States about Washington\u2019s big spending to prop up Ukraine\u2019s military have raised new uncertainties about the West\u2019s commitment to its efforts to expel Russian invaders more than 18 months into the war. And Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hopes to outlast allied backing for Kyiv, will be ready to capitalise if he sees Ukraine is running low on air defence or other weapons.<\/p>\n
The West has long been shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine against Russia. But between Ukraine\u2019s impassioned, unending pleas for help and huge handouts from its backers, signs of discord have emerged. In July, Britain\u2019s defence minister at the time said Ukraine should show \u201cgratitude\u201d to the West after Kyiv renewed its vocal \u2013 but unsuccessful \u2013 push to join NATO. This week, a new bout surfaced after Ukraine filed a complaint at the World Trade Organisation against three neighbours and European Union members \u2013 Hungary, Poland and Slovakia \u2013 for banning imports of Ukrainian farm products, a key export for the war-weary country\u2019s battered economy.<\/p>\n
The three bristled at the move, with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki shooting back that his country is \u201cno longer transferring any weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming ourselves with the most modern weapons\u201d. Some EU officials have warned that Putin is revelling at the new show of Western discord at a time when Ukrainian troops are making slow gains in their counteroffensive against Russian forces, who still control a vast swath of eastern and southern Ukraine. Still, from Washington to Warsaw, where the military cost and capabilities of helping Ukraine are at issue, officials are playing down any talk of a rift. \u201cI don\u2019t believe that one political dispute will lead to a breakdown,\u201d Polish President Andrzej Duda said, adding that his prime minister was only referring to newly ordered weapons that wouldn\u2019t ever go to Ukraine anyway.<\/p>\n
Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration\u2019s national security adviser, said on Thursday he believed that \u201cPoland will continue to be a supporter of Ukraine.\u201d Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a brief visit to Washington this week, sought to shore up US support for his country, which has factored into the political campaign ahead of next year\u2019s presidential election. Former President Donald Trump and leading GOP rival Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida say they want the US to stop sending weapons to Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, after meeting with Zelenskyy on Thursday, acknowledged that \u201cpeople are talking about how much money\u201d is being spent. But, he added, \u201cWe\u2019re investing in democracy.\u201d Other GOP presidential hopefuls like former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie support Ukraine. Politics over the issue is also playing out in Eastern Europe. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, a big backer of Ukraine\u2019s fight against Russia, appealed on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, for his counterparts in Ukraine and Poland \u201cto resolve current differences,\u201d and said his country was ready to \u201cfacilitate\u201d dialogue between them.<\/p>\n
Piotr Buras, a Warsaw-based senior fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations, said, \u201cPolish-Ukrainian relations have become hostage to the Polish electoral campaign,\u201d referring to the country\u2019s parliamentary elections next month. Nonetheless, the harm from Morawiecki\u2019s comments lingers, he warned. \u201cIt does a great deal of damage to the Ukrainian cause, as this narrative resembles and legitimises those voices in Europe (mainly on the far-right) that question the need to supply weapons to Ukraine,\u201d Buras said in an email.<\/p>\n
Robert Fico, a two-time prime minister in Slovakia, has returned as a front-runner in that country\u2019s parliamentary elections. His populist, left-wing party has staked out a pro-Russia stance and vowed to reverse Slovakia\u2019s military and political support for Ukraine if elected in the September 30 vote. Niklas Masuhr, a military analyst at the Centre for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said it\u2019s conceivable that some political parties might \u201cput their eggs in a nationalist basket to \u2026 curry favour with the electorate\u201d and avoid the impression of giving \u201cundue solidarity to Ukraine\u201d at the expense of domestic interests.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be naive to assume that there are no trade-offs between individual NATO countries\u2019 interests and Ukrainian interests,\u201d said Masuhr, who called Poland a \u201cstrident supporter\u201d of Ukraine when it came to delivery of military equipment. \u201cThere is broad strategic overlap, but that doesn\u2019t mean that in every case these interests are aligned,\u201d he said. Issues like energy or food supplies are \u201ccritical, or if you will, neuralgic, points in the relationship between these countries.\u201d Daniel Fried, a former US ambassador to Poland and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, said the recent standoff in Eastern Europe was \u201cnot the end of the Polish-Ukrainian alliance\u201d and pointed to Duda\u2019s effort to walk back the comments by his prime minister.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis mini-crisis may have peaked,\u201d Fried said by phone from Berlin. \u201cThis is going to happen \u2026 in a war kind of situation where people\u2019s nerves are fried, and there are real issues at stake. I\u2019m reasonably confident this will be patched up and is in the process of being patched up \u2013 at least I hope so,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Once rock-solid, the support that Ukraine has gotten from its biggest backers for its fight against Russia is showing cracks\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":3759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[990,991,987,976,723,265,988,891,295,989],"class_list":["post-3753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-eastern-europe","tag-elections","tag-lithuania","tag-nato","tag-poland","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-slovakia","tag-ukrainian-grains","tag-us-2024-elections","tag-weapons"],"reading_time":"5 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}