“The only credible alternative to maintenance of Western aid is, as it stands, surrender of kyiv”

One of the certainties fueled by experience is that wars rarely take place as planned. Vladimir Putin, after many others, can testify.

that the plan developed upstream of a cold triggered conflict ends up responding to the specifications of a military victory does not guarantee more success. The United States, the world’s leading military power, has shown twice in their inability to gain peace, in Afghanistan as in Iraq.

This double failure later encouraged them to drive the war “from the back” in Libya, or to refuse to engage in Syria. The renunciation of interventionism embodied by Barack Obama and then shared by his quasi-contract, Donald Trump, did not produce more satisfactory results for the interests of Washington and his allies.

While the war imposed by Russia in Ukraine entered, on January 24, in its twelfth month, its dynamic continues to retreat the limits that the Western supports of kyiv had set themselves, explicitly as implicitly, in matters of military aid. The latest crossing concerns the delivery of heavy fabrics of German manufacturing, which has become inevitable. These are the only available in sufficient quantity, within the most mobilized European countries in favor of a victory of Ukraine, in order to be able to play an effective role in the field.

At less than an improbable Russian brutal collapse, everything suggests that other red lines will be similarly crossed in the coming months. Undoubtedly under the same conditions combining Ukrainian insistent calls and improvisation, without these decisions being sufficiently explained to the public opinion of the countries concerned.

These successive erasures have reopened the debate on the legitimacy and relevance of this Western aid. These questions were supplied in particular in these columns (MO12345lemonde of January 21) by the former deputy of Paris Pierre Lellouche, who, on his credit, did not discover these questions before yesterday.

They had initially been decided by the unexpected resistance opposed by Ukraine to the violation by Russia of the integrity of its borders and its sovereignty. The contempt for the most basic laws of war by the aggressor, as evidenced by the massive bombing of civil infrastructure, then played in favor of aid which continues to gain power. But the relative bogging observed since the end of the autumn 2022 offensives of kyiv has relaunched them.

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/Media reports cited above.