U.S. President Joe Biden has been facing calls to provide more military support to NATO member countries in Eastern Europe. He's been meeting with leaders from nine countries on NATO's eastern flank, known as the Bucharest Nine Group.
They've been discussing ways to continue sending military and humanitarian supplies to Ukraine for what could be a long and drawn-out war. Some of the Eastern European leaders also now see Russia as a direct threat to their own country's security. While addressing the leaders of the Bucharest Nine, President Biden reaffirmed America's commitment to NATO.
Commitment by the United States to NATO is absolutely clear Article 5 is a sacred commitment the United States has made: we will defend every inch of NATO, and this is an important moment. I look forward to the discussion of the next steps we can take together to keep our line strong and further deter aggression.
Well, the Bucharest Nine is not a group that many people may be all that familiar with, so how significant is it that President Biden is addressing them today? It's quite significant, as you know, and it demonstrates that this part of the world, this eastern side, this eastern edge of NATO, has grown far more significant since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine a year ago, isn't it?
It's only been a year, but so much has changed, and the importance of this region is just one part of it. We've been on the border here in eastern Ukraine and seen how the landscape has changed, how there's much more weaponry now on this border, and how Patriot missile systems work. Anti-aircraft missiles from the United States are now defending NATO's eastern flank because the Bucharest-nine countries are afraid.
Most of those countries have been warning of Russian aggression for years, haven't they? And many may well feel vindicated today, but will those reassurances be enough? Everyone wanted to feel vindicated, didn't they? But there's a sense that many of these countries have been shouting loudly about Russian aggression, and they've been dismissed as perhaps hysterical, you know, too hung up on history, despite the fact that, of course, we have seen Russian aggression, we are seeing it, and we are concerned.
What does Joe Biden's visit say about the importance of this group of countries and their vulnerabilities?
It says they're vitally important, and one of the interesting developments in NATO over the last 20 or 25 years since the end of the Cold War has been that it's become a very complicated, large organization within itself with the expansion to the East, and as a result, the US has tended to use NATO as a kind of framework. It's still a valid political-military alliance, but they've tended to use it as a framework to build up coalitions of the willing to form bilateral relationships and trilateral relationships with individual countries, and this Bucharest Nine group should be seen as part of that. One of the key U.S. relationships in that area is with Poland. Poland has developed a very close military relationship with us, and the US is seeking to affirm and consolidate that bilateral relationship with Poland and those neighboring countries, and they are correct to regard themselves as the most vulnerable to any further conventional, God forbid, improbable nuclear escalation.
Isn't it true that during Joe Biden's second visit to the author in a year, he described the relationship between the two countries as critical, despite the war one year ago?
I'm afraid to say I look rather pessimistically at it, and that's why I think this meeting is very important because shoring up the support of those exposed NATO countries is very important because the war is going to go on for a long time. The Ukrainians, as they've announced, have to try and make another counteroffensive in the spring, and the Russians are going to resist that very strongly.
As you know, the war will last a significant number of months; our estimate is that they'll try to fight for the entire year, and they'll probably fight for the entire next year as well, so you're looking at the end of next year or 2024 before either the Ukrainians are successful or both sides decide they can't tolerate any more fighting, but you know that this meeting is important because it's a long process and it's going to be a bitter process.
We heard yesterday from President Putin and our correspondents that he's not looking for an exit and that if one does come, there could be an escalation, so what happens?
He was the news that received the most attention in terms of his withdrawal from the start of the agreement, and that is politically significant. Still, I maintain, like many commentators, that a nuclear escalation is highly unlikely. The escalation this year will be more civilian bombardments of Ukrainian cities to try and destroy Ukrainian morale, which will significantly increase the military efforts that we have seen ramp up in eastern Ukraine over the last month.