Zelensky pushes for Western aid to fight Russian ‘army of about 2 million people’
Joel Gehrke
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s requests for additional Western military aid have gained urgency as Western officials monitor Russia’s plans to mobilize a massive force of new conscripts to attack Ukraine.
“We have this appeal from Ukrainian leadership to help them to defend [Ukraine] in case Russia will come again with a big, big force … this is what we will most probably see in the springtime,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner.
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That expectation has figured into the recent trans-Atlantic decisions about how to continue to arm Ukraine, as the United States and Western European states have begun to authorize the provision of NATO-origin light tanks and armored vehicles previously not available to Ukrainian forces. Those Western deliberations have continued alongside a drumbeat of Ukrainian warnings that Russia, despite the heavy losses it has sustained over the last year and the organizational challenges to the fall mobilization, plans to conduct an even more ambitious draft.
“About 500,000 more Russians will join the Russian Armed Forces, which will allow the terrorist country to create strategic reserves,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Defense Intelligence unit said Friday. “The scale of enlistment activities conducted by the aggressor country indicates the plans of its leadership to create an army of about two million people.”
Those figures dwarf the size of the invasion force that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to launch the three-pronged attack to overthrow the Ukrainian government in February, although those formations included Russia’s most professional and best-trained troops, as well as their most advanced equipment. Russia has lost at least 1,600 main battle tanks, according to an online archive of photo and video evidence confirming each loss.
“Now we need even greater mobilization — in the whole free world,” Zelensky said Friday in an address to Lithuania‘s parliament. “We need urgent decisions by our entire anti-war coalition. New defensive decisions that will give Ukrainian warriors the opportunity to drive the Russian army out of our land. And this concerns, first of all, modern tanks and effective artillery.”
Those appeals have produced a breakthrough in recent weeks, as French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to send wheeled “light tanks” to Ukraine — the first offer of NATO-designed tanks to Ukrainian forces by a Western leader, followed soon after by a joint U.S.-German announcement that Washington and Berlin would send NATO-standard infantry fighting vehicles to the embattled nation.
“I think France knew very well that the U.S. is going to give Bradleys, but they just announced [their offer] hours before the U.S.,“ a second senior European official said.
Polish President Andrzej Duda joined the throng of milestone announcements with his own “decision to contribute a first package of tanks, a company of Leopard tanks” produced originally in Germany. Poland, like Ukraine, labored under Moscow’s oppression during the Cold War and inherited an arsenal of Soviet-style main battle tanks, which Duda’s government has been transferring to Ukrainian forces from the earliest months of the conflict. The proffer of the Leopards has extra significance, given Germany’s refusal over the last year to open its own stockpile of Leopards to Kyiv, a hesitance made more consequential by Berlin’s authority to block other countries from giving German-origin weapons to Ukraine.
“I think it’s pressure” on Germany, the second senior European official said of Duda’s announcement. “I think that’s coming. The tanks will come.”
Ukrainian forces need the Western weaponry to offset the numerical advantage that Russian forces could bring to bear on the front lines — a daunting prospect, some Western officials fear.
“NATO allies are sending what they can, but we see from all the overall information, what is happening in the front, that Russia can send more troops, more soldiers — more, just, people, to the front,” the first senior European official said. “And this is, for Ukrainians, in the long run, it is really a bad option.”
Nevertheless, the mobilized Russian forces nonetheless lack the benefit of the equipment lost over the last year, and Western powers have launched a concerted effort to break the supply chains necessary to replenish Russian arsenals.
“Our approach has been to deprive, to systematically starve Russia of the inputs that it needs to prosecute its brutal war of aggression against the people of Ukraine,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Jan. 4. “And if there are additional steps we can take, including additional export restrictions, that’s something we’ll take a close look at as well.”
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Those sanctions have contributed to Western skepticism about the effectiveness of Russia’s incoming waves of conscripts, although their sheer number could inflict heavy damage on Ukrainian forces.
“I think that has made countries move, at the moment, all those infantry fighting vehicles … are actually, I think, along this line,” the second senior European official said. “Russia has this dumb mass. And they are ready to sacrifice this mass. So the free world need[s] to arm Ukraine to help them win this war.”