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ADAPTIVE INDOMITABLE UKRAINE. Europe Realizing Ukraine Indispensable to Their Security Architecture [1]

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Date: 2025-03-30

It is hard to imagine that during the negotiations of the Minsk Accords which eventually failed and was almost immediately followed by the events of February 24, 2022 in which Putin launched his ill-fated SMO(Special Military Operation) into Ukraine that a country which was all but given up as lost( “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,”) would somehow manage to go toe to toe, mano a mano with the self-described “2nd Army in the world” and hold its own for over 3 years inflicting serious damage on the Russians in both personnel and materiel. On many levels what Ukraine has managed to do is without a doubt quite remarkable. Albeit with a huge assist from its friends … both cash and military assistance.

The Ukrainians have not only succeeded in substantially pushing Russia out of the Ukrainian lands it took at the onset of the war in 2022(27% in March 2022 to current 18%) but also managing to hobble the Russian economy to the extent that experts are saying that the Russian economy now fully on a war footing will likely go sideways if the war were to stop. The war in essence has now become the main engine of the Russian economy. Russia finds itself needing to keep this war going or it could possibly come apart at the seams, despite current smoke and mirrors efforts to present an image of a robust economy. According to Alexandra Prokopenko, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre:

Russia’s economic resilience may be short-lived. Its economic growth is likely to be a short-term phenomenon, fueled by soaring government spending on defence, where only those sectors connected to the army are expanding. There is no genuine increase in productivity, and the current growth is unsustainable. The economy is slowing down, low unemployment claims are misleading and inflation is much higher than the official data and growing. In contrast to the government’s optimism, Russia’s Central Bank projected only 1.5% growth for 2025, while the IMF gave an even lower estimate of 1.3%. Prokopenko suggests that economic activity is indeed slowing down while industrial facilities are already operating at 81% of their capacity, with 73% of enterprises reporting labour shortages. In other words, businesses are reaching their productive limits, and the economy is overheating. www.friendsofeurope.org/...

It is also obvious that Europe, recent outward gestures notwithstanding, is having some difficulty with the reality of needing to pull itself away from under the 75 year old American-led protective umbrella known as NATO/OTAN. At any level NATO has been a successful bulwark against the old Soviet Union during the Cold War era and in recent decades, Russia. But as former Ukrainian Army CinC, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, now Ukraine Ambassador to the United Kingdom recently said):

that Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which assumes that an attack on one country of the alliance is considered an attack on the entire alliance, simply "does not exist." According to him, this is evidenced by the reaction of the European countries of the bloc to the arrival of Russian drones. The Baltic countries understand that there is no NATO Article 5 and never was. Poland understands this, missiles fall there periodically, sometimes ours, sometimes Russian. Romania understands everything, but is silent... There is no Article 5. They called from Romania, asked not to say that their Geranis fell. They said, why did you turn on the electronic warfare, the missiles reached us. I said - shoot them down, you have 40 F-16s ” This even looks like a kind of invitation: if “Article 5 does not exist,” then what prevents Moscow from sending troops to Estonia and Lithuania, Zaluzhny asked. en.topcor.ru/…

General Valeriy Zaluzhny is known for his timely comedic and jocular turns(before the army he had hoped to be a comedian. Sounds familiar?) but is at the same time known for telling hard truths. It was exactly one such hard truth, his Op ED in the Economist magazine … that the present Russo-Ukrainian war was at a stalemate which cost him his job and ended his military career.

But the general is in his own way now telling Europe that Article 5 is de facto “unworkable” and that it is time for re-imagining a new Europe-centric security architecture … that Europe cannot really depend on Article 5 and that Putin is quite aware of this … America, especially under the current administration, will not come to save Europe. He also recently opined that the new U.S. administration is “destroying” established world order:

"We see that it is not only Russia and the axis of evil trying to destroy the world order, but the US is actually destroying it completely". www.bbc.com/...

Further that under the destructive impulses of the current U.S. administration, “the old world order has been destroyed. A new architecture of European security is impossible without Ukraine.”

It would appear that Zaluzhny’s words may be getting through if one were to give credence to the current efforts to stand up a “coalition of the willing” not only to actually put a pan-European force on the ground to safe-guard a post cease fire Ukraine but also to serve as a deterrent to any future Putin/Russian efforts to attack other European countries. And time is a wasting:

The Vice Speaker of the Seimas of Lithuania, member of Lithuania's parliamentary delegations to the Revolution of Dignity, Petras Auštrevičius, believes that forming a new defense alliance in Europe is impossible without Ukraine, as Kyiv has become Europe's strategic and most reliable partner today. global.espreso.tv/...

ADAPTIVE INDOMITABLE UKRAINE … from being previously seen as ”lost” to now being seen as indispensable and Europe's strategic and most reliable partner today. That is quite an achievement … by any measure.

SLAVA UKRAINI !

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