Two years after the failed lightning invasion with which Vladimir Putin intended to keep Ukraine under his sphere of influence, dark clouds are obscuring the commendable capacity of resistance of the kyiv army.
A week ago, Ukrainian troops were forced to withdraw from the strategic town of Avdiivka due to the disproportionate Russian artillery superiority and Russia's willingness to sacrifice as many soldiers as necessary for the advance.
In addition to a defeat of the same magnitude as that suffered in Bakhmut, it is feared that this withdrawal will be the turning point that inaugurates a Russian counteroffensive in which Ukraine may lose more territory.
The allies have done a lot to prevent kyiv from losing the war, but clearly not enough for it to win.
We cannot forget that it all started in 2014—with the little Russian men in green who occupied Crimea and with the secessionist militias organized by the Kremlin in Donbas—and resulted in a frozen contest that flared up again two years ago when Putin resumed the attack on bare face
Conforming today with the horizon of a new freeze in the conflict would be no guarantee of avoiding a new invasion or future direct provocations by Moscow against its neighbors.
Putin's war-mongering stage—from the incursion in Georgia in 2008 to the current war against Ukraine—is difficult to understand without a decrease in the deterrent capacity of Europe and the United States as a whole, and therefore of NATO.
To grant him a political victory now, even under the appearance of a provisional situation, would be to give him the green light to test the limits of the Alliance's deterrence, just at the moment when doubts about the United States are growing, not just in a future guided by Trump, but above all in a present mortgaged by the irresponsible behavior of the Republican Party, which blocks aid to Zelensky's Government in Congress.
Despite this being the most difficult moment for kyiv in two years, Putin's achievements must be placed in their exact point, which is not limited to his recent military success.
His regime is less isolated than the allies hoped and he has learned the lessons of his initial failures.
He has built an effective authoritarian alliance with Iran and North Korea, which guarantees him supplies of ammunition and missiles, and a more secretive and diplomatic one with China.
It evades sanctions thanks to the neutrality of a Global South that is increasingly angry with Washington due to the double standards it applies with Israel, also knowing that the invasion of Gaza and, above all, the unbearable toll of Palestinian deaths reaffirm its positions and seriously damage solidarity with kyiv.
Defeated in 2014, Ukraine unexpectedly prevailed against Putin's invasion that turned two years old yesterday and later recovered a good part of the lost territory.
In addition, it torpedoed Russian naval control of the Black Sea and achieved a key political victory with its admission as a candidate to NATO and the beginning of EU accession negotiations.
However, the 2023 spring offensive failed and is now at its critical moment, when it can lose everything if it does not try to win everything, a task in which the determined attitude of its allies is essential.
This and no other is the immediate difficulty faced not only by Ukraine but also by the European Union, a political community—but also a citizen—born and educated in the culture of peace, which arose from the trauma of the two world wars that They fought on their soil.
If it is about stopping Putin and beginning the recovery of the stolen territory, Europe must immediately seek the ammunition supplies that the United States is stealing from it, just as Josep Borrell has asked the Twenty-Seven and just as some have already undertaken on their own. This is the case of Denmark with the delivery of its complete artillery arsenal or the initiative of a group of countries led by the Czech Republic in search of ammunition already available in European warehouses.
Until now, with understandable caution led by the United States, the allies have practiced gradualist military solidarity to avoid the extension of the conflict or even an escalation in the use of increasingly dangerous weaponry.
Something similar has happened with the sanctions policy, which did not serve to deter Putin previously nor did it weaken him later to the point of defeating him.
If this is not someone else's war and democracy, European construction, and to a large extent the international order are at stake, the EU has no choice but to take a more decisive position so that Ukraine wins and to then ensure that can build its own deterrence system against Russia.
It is an objective that goes far beyond the much-claimed strategic autonomy of the Union and has its natural framework in NATO, where France and the United Kingdom are located, the two European nuclear powers, the only ones that can replace the current American umbrella in the case that Washington definitively abandons its commitments to Europe.
Only in this way will it be possible to prevent a repetition of aggression like the current one, in addition to covering the security of the continent with its own resources, since in a few months those of the United States could be missing if Donald Trump returns to the White House.