NATO has taken over the coordination of Western military aid to Ukraine from the United States, as planned, a source said on Tuesday 17 December, in a move widely seen as aiming to safeguard the support mechanism against NATO skeptic Donald Trump.
As reported by Reuters, the step, coming after a delay of several months, gives NATO a more direct role in the war against Russia’s invasion while stopping well short of committing its own forces.
Diplomats, however, acknowledge that the handover to NATO may have a limited effect given that the US under Trump could still deal a major setback to Ukraine by slashing its support as it is the alliance’s dominant power and provides the majority of arms to Kyiv.
Trump, who will take office in January 2025, has said wants to end the war in Ukraine swiftly but not how he aims to do so. He has long criticized the scale of US financial and military aid to Ukraine.
The headquarters of NATO’s new Ukraine mission, dubbed NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU), is located at Clay Barracks, a US base in the German town of Wiesbaden.
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters it was now fully operational. No public reason has been given for the delays.
In the past, the US-led Ramstein group, an ad hoc coalition of some 50 nations named after a US air base in Germany where it first met, has coordinated Western military supplies to Kyiv.
Meanwhile, the outgoing administration in Washington is scrambling to ship as many weapons as possible to Kyiv amid fears that Trump may cut down on deliveries of military hardware to Ukraine. Trump threatened to quit NATO during his first term as president and demanded allies must spend 3% of national GDP on their armies, compared with NATO’s target of 2%.
NSATU is set to have a total strength of some 700 personnel, including troops stationed at NATO’s military headquarters SHAPE in Belgium and at logistics hubs in Poland and Romania.
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