a day ago
Trump has finally shown us the path to peace to Ukraine
There is more to Donald Trump's recent announcement that the US will be sending Ukraine more Patriot air defence batteries than meets the eye. Over the last three months Trump has blown hot and cold over US support to Ukraine, apparently withdrawing weapons deliveries on a whim then capriciously restoring them.
But the Patriot deployment is importantly different, and is the fruit of three months of careful negotiation by a team of senior Nato officials.
The strategy, which this week took an important step towards realisation, is to provide Ukraine with an integrated anti-missile and anti-drone defensive system similar to Israel's Iron Dome.
Based on a linked-up network of Patriot batteries, electronic warfare sensors and drone interceptors that include mobile systems such as Britain's Gravehawk and Raven, the aim is to create an electronic fence along the line of contact between Russia and Ukraine.
Protecting Ukraine from future Russian air attacks is 'a key cornerstone for any sustainable peace settlement,' says Jean Christophe von Pfetten, Chairman of the Institute for East West Strategic Studies, who has direct knowledge of the ongoing back-channel negotiations.
Nato negotiators have faced three key challenges – persuading the Trump White House to provide the state-of-the-art Patriot systems, talking the Europeans into funding it, and attempting to cajole the Russians into accepting it. With the Trump announcement, the first two elements have fallen into place.
Talking the Kremlin into accepting remains the trickiest part. In February, after a series of top-secret meetings by senior Nato and Russian military and government officials, it seemed that Moscow was close to accepting Ukraine's deploying a system similar to Lockheed Martin's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense – known as THAAD – already deployed in Romania, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
But those talks broke down, and Russia remains opposed to a Ukrainian Iron Dome. So now, the US and EU have chosen to proceed with the integrated defence system without Russia's agreement.
'The only reason why no peace can yet be achieved is that Russia is not yet ready to accept a comprehensive technical defence system in Ukraine,' says Pfetten, who has been playing a direct role in the conflict resolution. 'The only point of discord is technical not political. And this disagreement has been going on for months now. Otherwise peace would have been achieved immediately upon Trump accession to the presidency.'
The new comprehensive air defence system will be based on a version of THAAD adapted to integrate weapons systems capable of shooting down massed drone attacks.
Lockheed Martin's original system is focused solely on intercepting cruise and ballistic missiles – including hypersonic missiles such as Russia's Kinzhal. What Ukraine needs is a defence system that is also capable of knocking out the hundreds of dumb drones that Russia fires every night in a deliberate attempt to overwhelm Ukraine's defences and fool operators into wasting expensive Patriot rockets.
Iranian-made Shahed drones – and their Russian-made clones, known as Geran – are two meters long, carry a 50 kilo warhead and cost under $20,000 to manufacture.
They can be brought down by Ukrainian-made anti-drone drones, or by European rapid-fire weapons systems made by BAE, MBDA and Sweden's Loke, among others.
The key to successful Iron Dome-levels of air defence are sophisticated radar and satellite systems that locate and track missiles and drones on launch and in flight. A single Patriot battery with its multiple radars costs over a billion dollars, so Europe must dig deep in its pockets. And a key challenge is to fund and deploy systems that will cover every sector of Ukraine and Russia's thousand-mile border.
But Trump's green-lighting of the first phase of the new Patriot deployments marks an important turning point. Once Ukraine is able to protect itself from Russian air attack Putin's continued aerial assaults will become pointless – and this will clear a path towards a ceasefire.
