by Joel Gehrke, Foreign Affairs Reporter
Pledging weapons to help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion is one thing, but getting them into the hands of fighters will require outwitting Russian spies and saboteurs along a perilous spy chain in which countless lives, and possibly a nation’s future, hang in the balance.
Rifles, armor, missiles, and artillery are poised to pour in from the West, providing a lifeline for the defenders of Ukraine, seen by NATO allies as the front line of the battle to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin. The effort by the United States and European members of NATO presents Putin with a choice: Allow the aid to reach Ukrainian hands and be used against Russian forces, or conduct risky operations to stop the shipments.https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.503.0_en.html#goog_142724434000:44/01:41
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“It’s definitely something that we have been taking into account since the beginning of the planning,” Czech Deputy Defense Minister Tomas Kopecny told the Washington Examiner. “There could be a Russian intent to target the convoys or the logistical path of the deliveries, so, yeah, we’re aware of the risk.”
The U.S. and the United Kingdom — along with more recent additions to the NATO alliance, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland — have been racing to deliver weapons to Ukraine since before the new offensive began. Still more have been pledged from Spain, Sweden, and Finland as the Russian onslaught over the last week turned the scramble into a large-scale effort by NATO and European Union member states, with deadly ramifications for the invading Russian forces.
“EU citizens and structures involved in supplying lethal weapons and fuel and lubricants to the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be responsible for any consequences of such actions in the context of the ongoing special military operation,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said Monday. “They cannot fail to understand the degree of danger of the consequences.”
The risk the countries are taking has a recent historical precedent in the Czech Republic. In October of 2014, a massive explosion destroyed a weapons depot near the Czech border with Slovakia, killing two civilians. The cause of the incident went unexplained until last year, when Czech officials blamed Russia for the incident and expelled 18 officials at the Russian Embassy in Prague on the grounds that they were undercover intelligence operatives.
“Just deducing from previous events, we can definitely expect that the Russians might try to sabotage those efforts,” said Zdenek Beranek, a career Czech diplomat seconded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to give foreign policy advice to the speaker of the Czech Chamber of Deputies — the Czech counterpart to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
That danger has deterred Hungary, one of four NATO member states that share a land border with Ukraine, from providing military aid or even allowing other allies to deliver weapons via routes that cross Hungarian territory. Poland and the two others, Romania and Slovakia, are providing assistance directly.
“They are very close,” Beranek said. “I can imagine that an offensive intelligence operation might be in Putin’s toolbox.”
That territorial link creates the possibility for the trans-Atlantic alliance to aid Ukrainian forces in much the same way that Pakistan provided safe haven and equipment to Taliban insurgents who fought against NATO forces in Afghanistan. U.S. officials hesitated to target the Taliban inside of Pakistan, formally a major non-NATO ally with a history of closing land border crossings for NATO supply lines in response to cross-border raids. The collective defense provision of NATO’s founding treaty, known as Article 5, presents Russia with an even more intense dilemma.
“If we’re talking about the possibility of Russia targeting those convoys, those trains, on NATO territory, it really is a very thin line from calling it a military attack on NATO — on NATO territory, on NATO forces,” Kopecny said. “If there is a military attack on NATO soil, it’s a cause for activating Article 5, which really brings the alliance and Russia closer to the conflict.”
Such a step would put the allies on historic footing with respect to Russia. The U.S. invoked Article 5 for the first and only time following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. NATO, which was founded to deter the Soviet Union at the outset of the Cold War, has never invoked Article 5 in response to a threat from Moscow.
“So this is something, I believe, that also the Russian state and the Russian leadership sees as the last resort, because the consequences of launching a military attack on NATO territory are quite clear and logical to everyone,” Kopecny said.
The allies are not relying on Article 5 alone to avoid such an escalation. The deliveries are so sensitive that even officials involved in the effort are careful when talking among themselves.
“Russians are very much looking into all of that, where it goes,” a European official from a donor country told the Washington Examiner. “Even for us, when we are in small groups, it’s not a good [idea] to ask detailed questions.”
The allies have been weighing the need for secrecy against the value of trumpeting the delivery of the aid, which boosts Ukrainian morale and puts pressure on other allies to increase their own assistance, and the risk that Russian spy services will piece together the information needed to interfere in future shipments.
“Usually, the information goes out only when the weapons are there and some of the deliveries are even not disclosed,” Atlantic Council visiting fellow Petr Tuma, another career Czech diplomat, told the Washington Examiner.
The Czech Republic has donated about $30 million worth of assistance. The Ukrainian Embassy in Prague has launched an online crowdfunding campaign to purchase even more weapons from the vast arsenals of private Czech defense companies.
“There is overwhelming support [among] the population for armed deliveries, and it proves to be quite important and consequential,” Tuma said. “They are fighting not only for them[selves] but for Europe, for the democratic world. That’s how people in Europe perceive this. And we have to do it.”
It has been widely speculated that Poland is functioning as a support zone where the assistance can be delivered and then retrieved by Ukrainian forces. Kopecny turned cagey when asked whether NATO allies are flying any equipment into Ukraine in defiance of Russian anti-aircraft systems.
“I can only say that we’re delivering them to Ukraine forces where they tell us,” he said, explaining that any direct answer would involve classified information. “Where they need it, where they say to get [it] to, we get it there.”
The history of the Cold War has left both sides with a long tradition of using sanctions and military maneuvers to apply pressure without stumbling into a direct conflict, much less the cataclysmic war that has been feared in the days since Putin issued his thinly veiled threat of a nuclear retaliation against a hypothetical NATO military intervention to protect Ukraine.
“It’s really about escalating the steps that we never want to lead, that should not lead, to nuclear warfare,” Kopecny said. “Of course, the escalation doesn’t mean that there will be immediately the response [at] the very end of the scale. But it’s the beginning, so, it’d be very undesirable.”
In any case, Kopecny and other officials agreed that even a successful Russian operation against the weapons shipments would only harden the allies’ determination to increase the shipments into Ukraine.
“It’s a war, and we have to continue doing this,” Tuma told the Washington Examiner. And if Russian operatives execute a “sabotage” of the shipments, he concluded, “then we have to act.”
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