NATO’s Silver Lining Playbook

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! We’re here in Munich, muscling through our jet lag with a powerful combination of coffee and Bavarian potato dishes to bring you another special on-the-road edition of SitRep from the Munich Security Conference (MSC).

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Taking stock of Ukraine’s war prospects, more questions on Israel’s campaign against Hamas, when Kyiv could get Western F-16s, and more.

It’s Not All Doom and Gloom for Ukraine

Ukraine has just lost another eastern city to the Russians after two years of fighting. Former U.S. President Donald Trump is openly talking about encouraging Russia to attack NATO allies that aren’t spending enough on defense. U.S. military aid to Ukraine is still being held up by Congress.

With all that in mind, SitRep had what we thought was a fairly innocuous question for NATO’s top military official Saturday morning. Two years in, are you pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances in fending off Russia’s full-scale invasion?

“I’m not!” shouted Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, pounding his fist on the table and sending the silverware in front of him clattering in the 15th-century vault-turned-restaurant in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel’s basement.

“Pessimists lose wars. Is it difficult for Ukraine? Yes. If you would have asked in 1942 in Europe, ‘How is the war going?’ I don’t think there were a lot of people that were overly optimistic. We still won.”

A palpable sense of doom and gloom has permeated the MSC, thanks to Russia, Trump, the Middle East, and, most recently, the shocking news of the death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

But that wave of depression is starting to get on the nerves of some senior Western defense officials focused on Ukraine. Their view: The dire warnings that the sky is falling on Ukraine are overblown, at least based on how things look now.

“I don’t buy into all that doom and gloom,” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told SitRep on the sidelines of the conference. “Look at what the Ukrainians have achieved over the last two years,” she added, pointing to things such as pairing cutting-edge drone tech with old Soviet military equipment. “Look at what the collective of allies and partners have done to support Ukraine over the past two years.” This includes not just NATO and European Union members but countries such as South Korea and Japan.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte had his own mini-rant about this on the conference’s main stage. “We have to work with whoever is on the dancefloor,” he said, referring to the upcoming U.S. election between President Joe Biden and Trump. “And all that whining and moaning about Trump—I heard that constantly over the last couple of days, let’s stop doing that.”

Even accounting for the fact that these types of conferences are saturated with navel-gazing governmental self-congratulations tours, we think the naysayers of the naysayers have a point.

Russia is far from starting to win. First, the narrative seeming to take root in some speeches and headlines that Ukraine is on the cusp of losing the war is way off base. The battlefield situation is serious but not to the point where Ukraine is at risk of a full-scale collapse or even facing major setbacks on the front lines, according to the assessments of more than a dozen European defense officials and experts we spoke to.

Russia has taken the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka but at an enormous cost in lives and ammunition for a city that has no real strategic significance.

“Militarily, it’s not a big loss,” said Bauer, the NATO committee chair. “They destroyed the whole infrastructure. So you don’t have a city. You have another couple of hundred meters,” he said of Russia’s territorial gains.

The steep costs for Moscow. Indeed, the scale of Russian losses in the war is truly staggering. Two years in, the Kremlin is still scrambling to transform the country to a wartime economy, and those losses will be hard to recoup. Russia has suffered some 315,000 casualties—accounting for 87 percent of its prewar troop levels, according to a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment—as well as lost 2,200 of its 3,500 prewar tanks and 4,400 of its 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has managed to take out a third of Russia’s once-feared Black Sea Fleet after sinking the Russian warship Caesar Kunikov this week, all while keeping vital economic Black Sea lanes open for Ukraine’s maritime trade exports.

Doing less with more. Even as Ukraine faces a new wave of ammunition shortages spurred by the political stalemate in Congress over U.S. funding for Ukraine, its lines are holding and European defense officials credit Kyiv with rationing its ammunition smartly and efficiently.

Still, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned at the conference on Saturday that an “artificial deficit” of weapons allowed Russia to take Avdiivka.

That Ukraine is holding Russian forces at bay in the face of these challenges—and the fact that everyone we spoke to predicts the front lines will stay relatively static in the coming months—is a credit to both the grit and determination of the Ukrainian armed forces and Russia’s poor battlefield tactics and reliance on ill-trained soldiers.

“I don’t think the sky is falling just yet,” said Christopher Skaluba, a former U.S. Defense Department official now at the Atlantic Council. “The Russians don’t seem to be going away, but the Ukrainians aren’t either.”

And yet… Still, that’s not a message that’s resonating with some of Ukraine’s strongest supporters, who are rattled by the prospects of wavering Western commitments and frustrated by the U.S. congressional impasse holding up what’s seen as a vital new package of aid and military equipment.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was one official who didn’t downplay the significance of Russia’s capture of Avdiivka. “When a citizen of Europe reads in the news that Ukraine retreated from Avdiivka, you should realize one simple fact—Russia has gotten closer to your home.”

On Munich’s Odeonsplatz, a large central square located just blocks from the Bayerischer Hof, Ukrainian supporters held signs urging the West to arm Ukraine faster and for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government to send Kyiv long-range Taurus missiles.

Back in the halls of the conference venue, there’s another concern keeping Ukrainian and NATO defense planners up at night: air defense. Ukraine is quickly running out of supplies of Western air defense ammunition, which is seen as critical to defending Ukrainian cities from Russian missile attacks and keeping Russian warplanes out of Ukrainian skies.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin shouldn’t be popping any champagne bottles just yet. “Let’s remember we are 724 days into Russia’s three-day war,” Bauer said.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

New doubts over Gaza war. Israel’s massive military operation in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack has transformed the small strip of land into a humanitarian nightmare. But even aside from that, some senior Western officials, defense experts, and lawmakers we spoke to are beginning to doubt whether Israel can even pull off a total military defeat of Hamas, as it first set out to do.

One British lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential internal government conversations, said they doubted the extent to which Israel had run Hamas out of northern Gaza, highlighting that the Israelis had yet to clear the territory they’d taken so far.

Israel is working on finding and destroying a massive network of Hamas tunnels built under Gaza, but four months into the war, “the amount of the tunnels that they’ve been able to fully clear and secure is minuscule,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

And even if Israel can successfully root Hamas out of the Gaza Strip, “Hamas is not only in Gaza,” said Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister. “They are all over the world.”

I’ll fly away. Ukraine is on track to get ahold of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets in June, two European officials told SitRep. “I think that in June we will see them in Ukraine,” said Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas, citing a timeline that was confirmed by another European official present at Munich. The Ukrainian government expects that 12 pilots will be trained on the fighter jets by the end of the U.S. fiscal year. (In layman’s terms, we call that “September.”)

Meanwhile, in Budapest. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—one of just a few EU and NATO heads of state not in Munich this weekend—said in a speech Saturday that the country’s parliament, controlled by his own Fidesz party, will ratify Sweden’s NATO accession at the beginning of its spring session, which starts later this month.

Hungary, the last remaining holdout on Sweden’s nearly 2-year-old NATO bid after Turkey’s parliament ratified Stockholm’s accession last month, has requested a high-level meeting with Sweden to hash out the details. But Stockholm, which is emerging from two centuries of foreign-policy neutrality, has said it doesn’t want the bid to be open to negotiation. “We hope that they will ratify us as soon as possible,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson told SitRep on Saturday.

Two of NATO’s strongest supporters in the U.S. Senate, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, meanwhile, are traveling to Hungary on Sunday to meet with top Hungarian officials after the end of the MSC.

Let’s Get Personnel

Judd Devermont has left his job as senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council (NSC), he announced on his LinkedIn page. Devermont, who spent two and a half years on the NSC after being tapped in October 2021, previously led the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has not yet said where he is headed next.

Want to be the EU’s defense commissioner? Are you from Central or Eastern Europe? If so, then you might be in luck. If European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen is reelected, she plans to hire a defense commissioner, she said at Munich on Saturday.

Snapshot

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pose for photos as they meet at MSC in Munich on Feb. 17. Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images

Overseen at Munich

Wrong chair. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, clearly tired from a morning of schmoozing, needed a seat at Falk’s Bar in the Bayerischer Hof on Saturday. Seeing none available, an aide demanded that Egypt’s top diplomat take one of the free chairs at the table that one of your SitRep hosts was occupying. But once he was seated across from a reporter, Shoukry wasn’t too happy to engage.

Still, it’s our job to interview officials—we’re not just in Munich to sample the local Bavarian delicacies—so we asked the weary Egyptian foreign minister a few questions. Shoukry said the meeting of top Western and Gulf foreign ministers was “news to me” and that nations involved would “expend every effort” to get a hostage deal in Gaza. Seeing the conversation hitting an impasse, your humble reporter exited stage left.

Is that seat taken? Meanwhile, Finnish President-elect Alexander Stubb was chased out of a table at Falk’s by a frazzled staffer, who was apparently looking for a spot for her boss to meet someone and who evidently didn’t recognize Stubb. He kindly gave up his spot.

Put On Your Radar

Sunday’s MSC program, in Munich time (GMT+1):

9:30 a.m.: Top officials meet for an hourlong town hall on Israeli-Palestinian relations. It will begin with a scene-setting interview with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, followed by a panel with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, and former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

10:30 a.m.: Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski join a panel titled “Adding Chairs to the Table: A Deeper, Wider, and More Capable EU?”

11:30 a.m.: EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell speaks ahead of a panel titled “Pinning Down Priorities: The EU’s Next Geopolitical Agenda” that features Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina and former Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

12:15 p.m.: Finnish President-elect Alexander Stubb speaks on a panel titled “No Time to Lose: Looking Sixty Years Ahead in Geopolitics.”

1:00 p.m.: Christoph Heusgen, the chairman of the MSC and a former German ambassador to the United Nations, gives closing remarks.

Quote of the Day

“This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.”

—U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith on the alliance, when telling SitRep about plans to put issues such as cybersecurity, disruptive tech, and climate change on the agenda for the upcoming NATO summit in Washington this summer. (For those unfamiliar, the line is a reference to a now-infamous 1988 General Motors advertising campaign for its new generation of Oldsmobile models.)