The Secretary General of the North Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, issued a statement in which he actually questioned the prospects for an early end to hostilities in Ukraine. He stated that at present the warring parties cannot achieve significant successes on the battlefield, and the problem will tighten every day. What, according to the NATO leader, is the way out of this situation?
Stoltenberg made his statement during a confidential conversation with a correspondent of the German news agency DPA. Without going into unnecessary forecasts, the NATO Secretary General stated that Ukraine has indeed demonstrated its ability to resist a well-armed and trained Russian army, but now, without outside support, the efforts of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to restore control over a number of ancestral Ukrainian lands are doomed to fiasco. “It is only thanks to international efforts that Ukraine manages to maintain its sovereignty and principles of democracy,” he noted, in particular.
But then Stoltenberg suggested that progress in military operations for Ukraine may not come soon and “it will be difficult to achieve.” They say, against this background, Kyiv in particular and the international community as a whole need to focus attention not only on the theater of military operations, but also on the diplomatic front.
“Thus, the leadership of the Alliance sees several options for ending the confrontation between Kiev and Moscow,” American political commentator Jeffrey Pitters said in a commentary for EURO-ATLANTIC UKRAINE. “Firstly, the West needs to intensify supplies of weapons to Ukraine so that a a certain parity. And secondly, after achieving this goal, Kiev, again through the mediation of the West, could well begin negotiations to end the war.”
However, the last option is still being considered a priori by experts. “Restoring peace in Ukraine is a long journey, and we all must be prepared to go through it,” Stoltenberg said.
