Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Jack and Robbie here. Robbie is in the middle of a 12-hour journey back across the Atlantic, while Jack files this newsletter from his hotel and recovers after the Munich Security Conference wrapped this afternoon. It’s about nap o’clock, we’d say.   Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Ukraine tries to get concrete weapons pledges at Munich, the United States believes China is considering giving Russia guns to fight Kyiv, and NATO’s secretary general race slowly heats up. 

With the Munich Security Conference wrapping up just days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky secured a pledge for fighter jet training from the United Kingdom, a large and variegated delegation of Ukrainians descended into the state-sponsored schmooze-a-thon with the wind at their backs to push NATO countries for the next big guns near the top of their wish list: F-16 fighter jets.

Ukrainian officials have been lobbying the Biden administration for the jets almost since the war started, and it has made a formal request for Dutch F-16s that may become redundant with Amsterdam’s purchase of F-35s. Some members of Congress and former U.S. officials want the U.S. Department of Defense to start training Ukrainian troops to fly American fighter jets–yesterday.

“This war has been going on since 2014, and most of my colleagues think it’s one year. It’s one year since a dramatically expanded invasion of Ukraine in a war that began in 2014,” said Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a close Biden ally. “In order for Ukraine to be able to deter a renewed phase of the war, they will need NATO’s standard modern, cutting edge equipment that will include F-16s.”

The jet question was a growing source of frustration in Munich, with a vocal cadre of former U.S. and military officials annoyed that the administration hadn’t kicked into action earlier with training pilots. “We should have started training four months ago,” Ben Hodges, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told SitRep.

Even the tight-lipped Gen. Chris Cavoli, the head of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, admitted behind the scenes that long-range weapons and F-16s could be a military asset to Ukraine.

The only silver bullet. But even if fighter jets might help stave off growing fears of Russian air attacks on the battlefield of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, Western officials are concerned that they might run out of ammo even sooner.

“The first thing they need is ammunition,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told SitRep in an interview. “Russia is firing every day the monthly European production of artillery shells.” Kallas used the conference to make a public push for the European Union to buy ammunition on behalf of its member states for Ukraine, an idea that got backing from the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell.

“These are not charities, they’re businesses,” said Hodges, the former U.S. Army Europe commander. “They have a supply chain. So you have to put in money.”

But the ammo shortages may just be par for the course in a grinding war. If Ukraine is able to take more territory it could help out politically, but some believe that static battle lines could persist. “I don’t have anything that leads me to think there will be a breakthrough,” one European official told SitRep. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk about military matters, said that Ukraine is still not close to pre-February 2022 battle lines.

Out of the doghouse. Maybe people were just being nice to the host, but Germany appeared to be off of Congress and hawkish NATO countries’ naughty list of countries reticent to send military aid to Ukraine, at least for now, after agreeing to send at least 14 Leopard tanks to Kyiv, and eventually up to 100, alongside a coalition of European allies.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz even used the conference to lightly–but publicly–nudge other European countries to move faster.

“I think Germany has stepped up in a way that has been really important, not just in the amount of support that they’ve provided, the equipment, the agreement to send Leopard tanks…but also as an example to all of the Europeans,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told SitRep over the clattering din of plates and cups in the Bayerischof Hotel’s Falk Bar. “Because, at the outset of this conflict, there were real questions about what Germany was going to do. And I think they have answered those.”

But underneath the happy talk, Western officials are trying to tread lightly to keep Germany’s defense spending buildup churning. Germany’s plan to beef up its military with a more than $100 billion fund is known as “Zeitenwende” or “turning point.”

“They don’t want Germany to drop the ball,” Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told SitRep over an impromptu lunch just off the Bayerischof Hotel campus. She equated the gushing from NATO allies to something like shepherding a child through a tough chore. “[You say] ‘you’re doing a great job’.”

Pyrrhic victory. But Ukrainian officials at the conference–and their allies on NATO’s eastern flank–remain worried that political gravity is still holding down the delivery of more weapons to Ukraine, like fighter jets. And they say that Biden administration officials aren’t always picking up their calls to hear the complaint.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker based in Odesa, told SitRep he sent requests to meet with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan several times to no response, a radio silence he said extends to some of his other Ukrainian colleagues. (Sullivan is frequently on the phone with Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of the president, his erstwhile counterpart in Kyiv.)

Goncharenko and other Ukrainian officials–not to mention members of Congress–are worried that Sullivan is behind the Biden administration’s cautious approach that has seen months of deliberations between each new upgraded weapons system being sent to Kyiv, as the Biden administration has tried to tamp down the risk of Russian escalation.

“It looks like he wants to boil this frog–Russia–slowly, not to let this frog jump out,” he said. “The problem is that Ukraine is boiled too.”

Lethal aid. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said China was weighing providing Russia with weapons, a decision that could escalate the conflict and offer Moscow’s struggling forces their biggest lifeline yet.

“The concern that we have now is based on information we have that they’re considering providing lethal support, and we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship,” he told CBS News.

The comments came after he met China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of MSC.

Wang used the stage at MSC to bash Washington for its decision to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon, a measure he called “absurd and hysterical.” (China denies it was a spy balloon, while U.S. officials and lawmakers are scoffing at their denial.)

“It’s safe to say there was no apology,” Blinken said of the meeting with Wang.

Spy chiefs. You wouldn’t catch it if you were watching the conference program, but spy chiefs descended on Munich in droves for meetings on the margins of MSC.

SitRep counted 27 top intelligence officials from around the world on the list of registered attendees for the conference, including 17 from Europe and top intel chiefs from Singapore, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and India. 

CIA Director Bill Burns also came in tow with the massive U.S. delegation. He spoke at a public event with Rep. Mike Turner, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and scholar Graham Allison. 

One thing of note he said, according to a CBS reporter in the room, was that there is “no higher priority” for the CIA than gathering information on Chinese leaders’ planning and intentions. 

Safe seat. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who is well known now in NATO circles but didn’t make an appearance in Munich, has faced intense speculation about his future after a corruption scandal broke out in his ministry. But insiders milling about the conference who spoke to SitRep his seat is safe–for now. 

Taking a victory lap, Reznikov sent texts with links to the news to former U.S. officials telling media outlets that his job was (for now) safe. One former U.S. diplomat got a text with a GIF of Reznikov posed next to the Ukrainian coat of arms, known as the tryzub.

Off to the races. One question on our mind on the Munich conference floor: Who is going to replace NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is set to leave his post in Brussels in October after nine years on the job? There are a few potential boxes that a good candidate to lead the alliance might tick: come from a (relatively) recently-joined ally, spend NATO’s threshold two percent of GDP on defense, and be a senior minister or (ideally) a head of state or head of government. NATO could also look to bring on its first-ever female secretary general. 

For now, the race seems wide open. One former European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the aforementioned Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas had already emerged in conversations, as has Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte and former Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović. 

Canada’s deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Minister Melanie Joly have also come up, but the former European official said Canada’s neighbor to the south might not take too kindly to bringing in a secretary general from a country under the two percent threshold (Canada spends about 1.5 percent of GDP on defense). 

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte would be a clear favorite if he threw his hat into the ring, insiders said, but it’s not clear yet that he’s campaigning for the job. Typically, the United States can step in late in the process as a kingmaker, as former President Barack Obama and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel did with the Stoltenberg pick in 2014. 

“The Americans don’t want to get the leftovers of a European food fight,” the former European official said.

Snack time. If you’re booked wall-to-wall in Munich, when do you have time to eat? Right before an interview, of course. As your SitRep host got lost on the way to meeting Kallas, the ​​quadrilingual Baltic head of government found time to grab an apple. Unfortunately for us, she was mid-bite when we got to our first question. 

Today: Blinken is off to Turkey, where he will take a look at the earthquake recovery effort and meet Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, before traveling to Greece on Tuesday. 

Monday, Feb. 20: U.S. President Joe Biden begins a two-day trip to Poland to mark a year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“If you look at it from a Ukrainian perspective, speed is the essence. It’s always yesterday.”

– A former NATO official who met SitRep for drinks at the conference bar.

That’s it for us from the Munich Security Conference. We’ll see you back at the regular time on Thursday.

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