Although the Ukrainian military has repelled Russian attempts to overwhelm defensive positions around the city of Sievierodonetsk, in the Donbas province of Luhansk, in the past 24 hours Russia has shelled a school sheltering more than 200 people there, killing three, and launched artillery fire into the city, killing 12. That, according to the Ukrainian military's morning war assessment.
Far to the northwest, near Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkiv, Russian forces have not yet given up, even after Ukrainian forces pounded them into retreat in a massive counteroffensive. Russia has retained defensive positions in the area north of Kharkiv, to either facilitate a more secure retreat into the motherland or possibly to allow time for reinforcements to arrive. And Russia's forces are making themselves known via artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions, as this devastating video shows.
Video of Russian night artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions in Kharkiv Oblast.https://t.co/PLKGN8qWPf pic.twitter.com/OWM9kOxPcp
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) May 21, 2022
Both developments, those around Kharkiv and the Donbas city of Sievierodonetsk, indicate Ukraine's withering lack of counter-battery radar systems, which track the trajectories of fired artillery, thus locating the artillery's position and enabling counterstrikes.
Ukraine's crippling absence of advanced radar systems also indicates woeful gaps in NATO supplies of war matériel, which is to say, virtually none. As The NY Times reports, the Ukrainian government has always given thanks for the West's military assistance, but those thanks go to individual, aiding countries. "It has been critical of NATO over what Ukrainian officials have called the alliance’s lack of support since the Russian invasion," writes the Times.
In a stern address to the Ukrainian people last night, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba asked, "Could you name at least one consensus decision made by NATO over the past three months that would benefit and help Ukraine?" Kubela again acknowledged the military aid dispensed by separate NATO countries: "It is true that the alliance members, individually or in small groups, are really doing awesome and important work, providing vital assistance." But, he continued, "NATO as an institution has done nothing during this time.... They have balked at taking any steps that could provoke a Russian attack on any alliance member."
The foreign minister was merely stating what Al Gore would call an inconvenient truth. NATO, a Western institution originated to check military aggression in Europe, has wimped out. Its Article 5 provision has proven itself either a straitjacket or, more likely, an excuse. Chiefly, however, NATO's inertia is caused by that which Mr. Kubela identified: fear of Russian retaliation. (If NATO's member states have failed to "provoke a Russian attack," why would NATO's institutional assistance be any different?)
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is free to behave like the Borg, announcing that resistance is futile and assimilating Ukrainian populations through imminent annexation. And if anything assures that the Russia-Ukraine war will be a long, long slog, it is the combination of Russia's relentless revanchism and Ukraine's determination to resist. Said President Zelensky's deputy chief of staff, Andriy Sybiha, in a television interview yesterday, “There won’t be a Minsk-2 or Minsk-3. There will be absolutely no compromise over our territorial integrity and sovereignty; these are fundamental positions." (The New Voice of Ukraine)
The completion of Ukraine's objectives can be done, and odds are, they will be done. But they could be done much more quickly if NATO stopped worrying about what Putin might do and simply decided to do what it must do.