Bloomberg: Western allies are about to fail Ukraine, again

Kyiv’s allies in the West have been at fault for of most of these failures and it seems clear they are about to deliver another. At this point, any attempt at negotiation seems highly unlikely to succeed, because Russia’s Vladimir Putin can see a major change developing in his favor, Bloomberg notes.

Washington’s ill-fated US decision to attack Iran earlier this year has ripped through US stocks of Patriot interceptors, the only system available to Ukraine that can consistently bring down ballistic missiles. Kyiv has run out just as Putin uses his own ramped-up production to target Ukraine’s ports and cities. On Wednesday, all 24 ballistic missiles fired got through Ukraine’s defenses. Western delays and reluctance to supply interceptors “lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post.

Whatever the improved mood when Zelenskyy visited Trump in Washington last month, he didn’t get the 300 new Patriot interceptors he wanted (they would represent about a third of remaining US stocks). The American president also seemed to take off the table a longer-term solution of building Patriots under license in Ukraine. Kyiv’s diplomats have been told to scour the world for donors, but the one region that had them stockpiled in numbers — the Gulf — now needs all it can get.

This time, the Kremlin is acquiring a significant new advantage: the ability to strike any Ukrainian target from Lviv on the Polish border to Dnipro in the East, without having to expend nearly as many million-dollar ballistic missiles to breach Ukraine’s now Patriot-less defenses.

This is potentially game-changing. It means being able to destroy Ukraine’s already shrunken capacity for power and heat generation faster than it can be restored this winter. And that, in turn, portends grid blackouts, life-threatening cold in city apartment blocks and potential new waves of mass migration at a time when the issue has become a political third rail in Europe.

There are just three possible ways forward now. The first involves Kyiv’s allies finding some Patriot interceptors and providing precision long-range strike capabilities to destroy Russia’s ballistic missile factories and launchers in time for the winter. In the second, Ukraine capitulates to Putin’s demands by handing over the rest of the Donbas region. In the third scenario, the war grinds on through another, still more brutal winter.

The first path is preferable, but unlikely. Two US companies have been fast-tracking the development of new low-cost cruise missile designs with an expected range of about 300 miles (482 km), up from the 180 miles for the British Storm Shadows that the Ukrainians have had available until now.

These, like Patriots, are in short supply. A spate of recent reports suggest the US has used up about half of its stock of Tomahawks, and up to 80% of its mid-range ATACMS, or Army Tactical Missile Systems. This is not all Trump’s fault. The attack on Iran was a needless waste of resource and a cardinal error, but the cumulative underproduction of Patriots and other critical defensive weapons long predates this president.

Option two is still less likely. No Ukrainian leader could accept Russia’s current terms and survive at their post. Putin wants to be given the so-called fortress belt of Donbas cities that continue to defy his forces. The roughly 400,000 people who lived there before the war still call it home. This strip of uneven terrain and urban sprawl forms Ukraine’s last natural defenses before the Dnipro River.

Kyiv can’t hand them over, precisely because the Kremlin wants them so badly — evidence, in itself, of Putin’s continued appetite for conquest. That makes scenario three — more war, stretching at least into 2027 and likely beyond — the default outcome, with all the attendant costs in blood and treasure that implies.

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