International Institute for Strategic Studies warns that Moscow could arm separatists more quickly than US could reinforce Ukraine’s forces

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Any US weapons supplied to Ukraine would be more than matched by an increase in Russian arms supplied to the separatists, a leading security thinktank has warned.

Russia could arm the separatists much more quickly than the US could reinforce Ukraine’s forces, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said.

The warning comes as intensive fighting continues in eastern Ukraine with more than 20 people killed as government forces and pro-Russian rebels jockey for position before peace talks in Minsk on Wednesday.

Barack Obama has thrown his support behind German diplomatic efforts to contain Russia in Ukraine, but some in Washington, including the incoming defence secretary, Ashton Carter, and some Republicans in the House of Representatives, favour more military support to Ukraine.

Obama has hinted that military alternatives under consideration by the White House remain largely symbolic and fraught with danger.

If the US announced the supply of arms to Ukraine, Russia would immediately respond by openly declaring the supply of weapons to the separatists, said Ben Barry, land warfare expert at IISS and former brigadier in the British army.

Russia “could introduce [weapons] much more quickly than the US”, he said, adding that US arms “would be overmatched by Russian escalation”.

Barry was speaking at the launch of the IISS latest annual Military Balance survey.

John Chipman, the thinktank’s director general, pointed to opposition, notably by Germany, to the supply of arms to Kiev.

“The German government considers there is no amount of arms that the west might give Kiev that would not potentially be matched by Russian support to the separatists and that therefore arms shipments to Kiev are not the answer,” Chipman said.

However, he added: “A growing body of opinion in the US Congress considers that the US has a moral obligation and a strategic duty to provide Ukraine with increased means to defend itself.”

On Sunday, the head of the international organisation monitoring the conflict in Ukraine also warned that supplying weapons to the Ukrainian army would risk an expansion of the war.

“This carries a risk with it, and the risk is that this will strengthen a narrative we are seeing already appear on the side of the separatists, that they are fighting a war against Nato and against the west,” Lamberto Zannier told the Guardian.



“And if armaments appear from those countries on the Ukrainian side, that will strengthen that narrative and might even push the Russians to take a more direct role in the conflict, because it might push Russia to see itself somehow threatened.”



Chipman said on Wednesday that while the Europeans seemed focused on a ceasefire, the other parties – the separatists and the governments of Ukraine and Russia – were thinking more strategically and had entirely incompatible aims.

“President Poroshenko seems determined to ensure that Kiev’s writ runs across the whole of eastern Ukraine and that it controls the entire south-eastern border,” Chipman said. “The Kremlin, by contrast, appears to desire a fractured Ukraine, unable to move beyond Russia’s orbit and get closer to western institutions. Whereas the Kremlin might be content for the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic to exist within their current borders, the separatists are not. They want to control all of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, to achieve a measure of economic viability, and they refuse to see their future within Ukraine.”