Specter of Another War in Europe Hangs Over Munich

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! This is the last of our special on-the-road editions at the Munich Security Conference (MSC). Thanks for coming along for the ride. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming this Thursday.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Europe prepares for the threat of a wider conflict with Russia, the U.S. Senate is optimistic on freeing stalled U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and yet another NATO ally hits the 2 percent defense spending mark.

Ready to Fight

Sunday, always the final day of the MSC, is traditionally when world leaders get a flair for the dramatic. On the last day of the conference in 2023, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas called on the European Union to jointly buy artillery ammunition for Ukraine. Later that day, the bloc’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, announced that the EU would make it happen.

But this time, as the 28 heads of government and state, 56 foreign ministers, 20 defense ministers, 36 spy chiefs, and hundreds of lawmakers from all over the world packed up and got ready to head home and the labyrinth of security checkpoints began to come down, it was a big announcement from Saturday that was still the talk of the town.

At a Ukrainian-themed lunch on Saturday afternoon, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen made a dramatic announcement: “We, Denmark, have decided to donate our entire artillery to Ukraine,” she said. “I am sorry, but the issue is not just about production. Europe still has military equipment. It has to be transferred to Ukraine.”

Frederiksen’s declaration—and its implicit challenge to other European countries to step up their own efforts to aid Ukraine—consumed the last day of the conference and left attendees grappling with some existential questions: Are they prepared not just to help Ukraine but also to defend Europe from a possible Russian attack on a NATO country? Are democracies capable of standing up against the threat of territory-grabbing dictatorships like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s?

Readying for war. Frederiksen’s announcement follows weeks of talk, including in Denmark, about preparing Europe for more conflict. Denmark’s defense minister has suggested that Russia could rebuild its capabilities to attack NATO soil within three to five years. Some officials whom SitRep spoke to in Munich thought Russia might even be ready more quickly.

“We do not have any illusions that Russia will change,” Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister, told SitRep on Saturday. “[Putin’s] goal is to show that the West is not functioning, that NATO is not functioning, that Article 5 is not functioning. That is his goal.”

The hysteria about a potential conflict with Russia has been crisscrossing Europe for weeks. Swedish defense chief Gen. Micael Byden’s warning in early January that all Swedes should mentally prepare for war—even though Sweden has been issuing pamphlets to citizens for years warning of all-out sabotage by a foreign power—went viral on TikTok and left the telephone lines of Sweden’s child protection group besieged by frightened children and teenagers.

And a warning late last month from a top British military official, Gen. Patrick Sanders, that Russia is intent on “defeating our system and way of life” and his call for Britons to get ready for a level of mobilization not seen since World War II forced press flacks at No. 10 Downing St. to step in to clarify that they weren’t reinstating the draft.

NATO allies are preparing for the possibility of a Russian challenge in almost any respect, be it boots on the ground or a debilitating cyberattack. “What Russia aims to do is to be able to challenge us in every domain and at every level,” a NATO official told SitRep on Sunday. A lot depends on what happens in Ukraine, but Russia has dramatically increased its production of artillery shells, tanks, armored vehicles, and missiles, the official said.

Production problems. Even though Frederiksen thinks most NATO allies—and NATO-adjacent countries—can give more weapons to Ukraine without increasing production, most allies still want to increase production to help get the Ukrainians ready for another push against Russia in 2024, they say. “One of the challenges we are having right now is that we have a defense industrial base inside Europe that’s adapted to a peacetime situation at the same time as a large-scale war,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson told SitRep.

Kallas, who first made the call for the EU to buy ammo for the Ukrainians last year, now is asking the bloc to issue war bonds to help out with Kyiv’s defense.

But, of course, this is the same thing attendees hear every year from European leaders at Munich: We need to do more. Some analysts also downplayed Frederiksen’s announcement as essentially not new: Denmark said in April 2023 that it would give 19 artillery pieces to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, there are questions about what NATO allies and Europe actually need to do to prepare for a possible wider war with Russia. NATO has established its own undersea research center, and officials said they are looking at efforts to further harden data cables and oil pipelines, after the cutting of the Balticconnector gas pipeline last year. Some countries are thinking about issuing more pamphlets—as the Swedes have already done—so civilians can prepare for the worst. Allies might even need to start building their roads to be sturdy enough to carry more tanks.

“If any Russian soldier puts their foot on NATO territory, we will defend every inch of it,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who made headlines at the conference by saying Ukraine must defeat Russia (more than his boss, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has said) and calling for NATO allies to go beyond the pledge of spending the equivalent of 2 percent of GDP on defense.

Democracies versus dictatorships. But even as U.S. and European officials were looking at the bright side of Ukraine’s prospects in beating back the Russian invasion, there was frustration from Kyiv that the U.S. House of Representatives was heading to a two-week recess without passing $60 billion in additional military aid for Ukraine, just as many Ukrainian troops were rationing ammo.

It’s not something the Ukrainians think would happen in the Putin regime. “Please remember, everyone, that dictators do not go on vacation,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the conference on Saturday.

And north of Ukraine, in Belarus, where Putin acolyte Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime engaged in a widespread crackdown after the country’s disputed 2020 election, the opposition is also worried about the failure of democracies to hang tough with dictators. “Sorry for this, I think that dictators don’t respect democracies,” Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said at a panel late Saturday night. “They are slow, sometimes, in making decisions. They are sometimes not decisive. They are not united.”

“What will be the real red line after which democracy will show its power?” she added. “Not orange, not blue, not teal, but [a] red line.”

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

One bill to rule them all. The talk of the conference, both on the stage and in whispers in the corridors, was whether the major U.S. national security funding bill that has been been stuck in Congress for months would pass. At around $95.3 billion—including more than $60 billion for Kyiv—it’s seen as critical to helping Ukraine to keep up the fight against Russia. Indeed, the White House blamed the fall of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka to Russian forces this weekend on Republican blockades on the bill.

We caught up with Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a supporter of the bill, about this and his own conversations with Zelensky at the MSC. Risch said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the bill would pass. “I’ve told Zelensky that directly,” he said.

The bill passed the Senate 70-29 and now is stuck in the House over procedural disagreements, stemming both from the deeply divided Republican stance on Ukraine and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s frustration that the bill doesn’t do enough to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

Ukrainians and other European allies are nervously keeping their fingers crossed.

China and Ukraine. One of the biggest “what ifs” of the Ukraine war keeping Western defense planners up at night is the prospect of China more fully embracing Russia’s invasion and beginning to back it militarily. So far, Chinese support to Russia has been limited, though its trade ties still offer Moscow a vital lifeline.

That’s why one of the most significant side meetings we saw this weekend was on late Saturday, when Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. Kuleba kept the public readout of the meeting frustratingly but unsurprisingly vague. “We agreed on the need to maintain Ukraine-China contacts at all levels and continue our dialogue,” he said.

Wang, meanwhile, sought to give a careful public message to MSC attendees on China’s position on Ukraine—but, of course, in a roundabout and carefully worded diplomatic way, saying that China does not “sell lethal weapons to conflict areas or parties to the conflict” and does not take “any advantage of the situation.” And he made no explicit mention of Russia and China’s “no limits” partnership announced in February 2022.

One more over the line. Jonson, the Swedish defense minister, told SitRep on Saturday that 19 NATO allies will reach the alliance’s pledge to spend the equivalent of 2 percent of GDP on defense by the end of 2024. That’s a higher figure than NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg had previously cited. The NATO defense ministers figured that out at the latest ministerial meeting this week in Brussels, Jonson said. (Sweden attended the meeting as an invitee to the alliance.)

“When Sweden joins later, there’s going to be 20 allies” at 2 percent, Jonson said. He wouldn’t fess up the name of the 19th ally to meet the mark, though.

Snapshot

Conference attendees mingle during a dinner reception at the Munich royal residence during the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 17. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Quote of the Day

“Never thought I should see the day that a Republican Senator wants to cut a deal with Putin while the Green Party chair argues against negotiations and for more weapons deliveries.”

—Die Zeit international correspondent Joerg Lau on the role reversal at Munich this year.

His statement came after U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance argued at the conference on Sunday that even if passed, the stalled Ukraine aid package wouldn’t “fundamentally change the reality” on the ground in the war and that Russia has an incentive to negotiate peace. Ricarda Lang, the co-leader of the German Greens, pushed back, saying that Putin has repeatedly shown “that he has no interest in peace at the moment.”