Ukraine can’t win with such timid US leadership

When I look back at NATO’s 75th-anniversary summit last week, the image that will stick in my mind won’t come from the conference itself.

Instead, it will be the indelible scene of a pediatric surgeon — his white apron covered with blood — desperately trying to rescue any tiny bald patients trapped in the rubble after a Russian Kh-101 missile collapsed the chemotherapy ward at Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv last Monday.

By deliberately targeting the most advanced children’s medical facility in Ukraine on the eve of the NATO conference — as well as a nearby maternity hospital that specializes in problem pregnancies — Vladimir Putin sent a chilling message to NATO members as well as an embattled President Joe Biden.

“I can do anything I want to Ukraine, and you won’t stop me,” was the missive Putin effectively delivered, daring the NATO allies to prove otherwise.

“The Russians are showing they aren’t worried about the consequences,” I was told by Ukrainian parliamentarian Yehor Cherniev. “The absence of a strong reaction (to the bombing of the hospital) convinces them they are right.”

That lack of a strong reaction reflected a summit that, for all its real achievements, was still hobbled by the frightening lack of leadership in Washington — from both parties. It exacerbated the failure of NATO to truly put Ukraine on a clear path to membership. And Putin smiled.

Most grotesque was Donald Trump’s total inability to grasp the Moscow threat as he prattled last week at campaign rallies about his “very good relationship with Putin” and his disdain for NATO.

But Biden, who clearly understands the stakes, still blocked a Kyiv response to the attack on the hospital. He failed to lift the U.S. ban on letting Ukraine use U.S.-made long-range missiles to strike the aerodromes from which the attack was launched, deep inside Russian territories.

In other words, Russia can still destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, electricity grids, thermal heating systems — and hospitals, schools and markets — at will.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg could barely contain his upset with the U.S. limitation during a news conference at the summit’s end. “There is no question that Ukraine has the right to hit legitimate targets on the territory of the aggressor,” he stressed.

Since Russia has opened a new front by sending thousands of glide bombs into Ukrainian cities, the only way to stop this aggression is at its source.

The U.S. touted NATO’s new aid package of U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems and F-16 warplanes to Ukraine. But here again, U.S. and NATO policy is too little, too late.

Kyiv, which lacks any viable air force, has been begging the West for Patriots to protect its cities since the war began. While Western allies have a reported 100 systems, until now only Germany has delivered — sending two — while the U.S. donated one.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Washington that seven new Patriot systems are the minimum needed to protect major cities. But at the summit, Germany, Romania, Italy and Washington offered only one new Patriot system each. Another will be cobbled together from European parts, helping NATO deliver five altogether.

But here’s the kicker: Israel has eight Patriot systems, on loan from the U.S., which it has put into mothballs because it considers them old technology, long replaced by Israeli defenses. Yet, the White House has failed to press Jerusalem to return some or all to Washington to be forwarded to Ukraine.

As for the F-16s that are coming from the Netherlands and Denmark, the Pentagon continues, astonishingly, to slow-walk training for competent, English-speaking Ukrainian pilots, leaving only about a dozen prepared to fly. This is absurd. Yet, the White House has failed to prioritize training for Ukrainians. Nor has it permitted retired U.S. pilots to do the training abroad.

“If NATO is not ready to protect us, and to take us into the alliance, then we ask NATO to give us everything so we can protect ourselves,” Zelenskyy told me in a recent interview in Kyiv. Hampered by White House timidity, that did not happen last week.

European leaders made repeatedly clear at summit events that they would like to see Washington move faster. Those countries bordering Russia fully grasp the danger: The Kremlin has been upping cyberwarfare, sabotage, and assassination attempts within many of their countries and inside their territorial waters.

In another nasty message from Putin, CNN reported last week that the U.S. and Germany broke up a Russian assassination plot to murder Armin Papperger, the head of Europe’s largest arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall, which sells critical 155 mm artillery shells to Kyiv, and will soon start producing them in Ukraine.

Even with all the uncertainty, there was some good news at the summit.

The event demonstrated that Putin’s violent effort to destroy a peaceful neighbor has revived and unified the alliance — along with Biden’s leadership.

Two-thirds of NATO countries now meet the 2% floor on defense spending, and, for the first time, there are some serious efforts to unify allies’ defense production and innovation.

Moreover, contrary to Trump’s claims, the European Union plus individual member nations are already giving Ukraine far more military and economic aid than the United States. And $40 billion in annual military aid will now be funneled proportionately by member states through NATO to try to Trump-proof any U.S. military aid cutoff.

But the Europeans do not have the military heft, or heavy defense production, to help Ukraine defeat Putin if the White House refuses to face the Ukrainian urgency of now or if Trump wins and cuts off aid.

Biden — whatever happens surrounding his candidacy — can still rectify the summit’s missed opportunity. The current White House policy of helping Ukraine hold the line — without providing the weapons needed for it to win — won’t work.

To ignore Putin’s sadistic challenge at the children’s hospital is to encourage Russian escalation. To let Kyiv respond is to deter escalation by making clear that Moscow will pay a strong penalty.

If Biden acknowledges that truth — and lifts restrictions on long-range ATACMS missiles, while retrieving those Patriot missile batteries from Israel — the Democrats could show their foreign policy smarts in November, compared with Trump’s Putin-blindness.

But failing a White House sense of urgency, most of the many Ukrainian think tank and parliament members with whom I spoke at the summit left Washington deeply worried about Biden’s limits and the possibility of a Putin triumph, aided by Trump.

They were determined to fight on, despite U.S. weakness, but more than a little scared.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.