October was probably the best month for the Russian dictator, who waits patiently for his adversaries to become exhausted, says The Washington Post’s columnist.
Meanwhile, Republicans treat the U.S. Congress with a "poison pill" by separating aid to Ukraine and Israel, North Korea beats the EU in sending ammunition to the battlefield in Ukraine, and the German foreign minister proposes to start integrating Ukraine into the European Union before the decision on full membership is made.
offers a digest of Western mass media at the end of the October 30 – November 3, 2023, business week.
October results: the Kremlin dictator has reasons to celebrate
October was probably the best month for the Russian dictator Putin since he unleashed his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, argues Lee Hockstader, a columnist for The Washington Post. If the trend remains, Kyiv faces a menacingly greater chance of losing the war, and that should seize the West’s attention.
- In the first few hours of October 1, Moscow time, Congress voted to keep the U.S. government running but rejected a $6 billion package of military and civilian aid for Ukraine
- Slovakia elected a new government whose prime minister, pro-Russian populist Robert Fico, has suggested he would further block European Union military and economic assistance to Ukraine
- A week after Fico’s electoral victory, on October 7, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, diverting the world’s, and Washington’s, attention from Ukraine. Israel’s brutal reprisals in the Gaza Strip gave Russian propaganda an excuse to criticize the West by comparing the actions of the Israeli army with in the Russian atrocities in Ukraine
Palestinians leaving their homes in the Gaza Strip on October 13, 2023. Photo: Getty Images
- Ukraine’s military counteroffensive, launched in June, sputtered to a halt. Meanwhile, Moscow’s troops launched their own attack on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, showing that the Kremlin remains willing to use its bottomless supply of fresh soldiers as cannon fodder
- Republicans elected a new House speaker, Mike Johnson, who has voted repeatedly against funding for Ukraine. Immediately after being sworn in, he said he would block President Biden’s effort to tether a new $61 billion aid package for Ukraine to a new weapons package for Israel
- A final bouquet for Putin was delivered at the end of October, when a new poll in France put Marine Le Pen, an extreme nationalist with long-standing ties to Russia, atop the pack of plausible candidates in the 2027 French presidential election. Though Le Pen has condemned Putin’s invasion, she has also opposed arming Ukraine.
Not all the October news was good for Putin, Hockstader notes. In Poland, a right-wing government whose steady backing for Kyiv had begun to waver was defeated. The new government, which might take power before the end of the year, is likely to reaffirm Warsaw’s solid support for European aid for Ukraine, which has now surpassed U.S. backing.
But the Russian dictator is playing the long game, attuned to every fissure in the transatlantic alliance. And the greatest potential crack of all — a potential election victory for Donald Trump — could be game, set and match for the Kremlin tyrant as well, the author concludes.
A "poison pill" from Republicans: aid to Ukraine postponed
Mike Johnson delivering his inaugural speech after being elected the speaker of the House of Representatives. Photo: Getty Images
The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a Republican plan to provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel and cut funding of the Internal Revenue Service, Reuters reports.
The bill's introduction was the first major legislative action under new Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. The measure passed 226 to 196, largely along party lines, a shift from typical strongly bipartisan congressional support for providing aid to Israel. Twelve Democrats voted with 214 Republicans for the bill, and two Republicans joined 194 Democrats in objecting.
But because the bill left out aid for Ukraine, President Joe Biden promised a veto and Senator Chuck Schumer, majority leader of the Democratic-controlled Senate, said he would not bring it up for a vote.
Schumer said the Senate would consider a bipartisan bill addressing the broader priorities. However, the dispute between the two chambers could mean it will take weeks to approve it since the bill would have to pass both the House and Senate and be signed by Biden to become law.
House Republican leaders combined the cost of the aid to Israel with cutting some funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They said cutting the agency's budget was essential to offset the cost of the military aid to Israel. But Democrats called this proposition a "poison pill" that will increase the U.S. budget deficit by cutting back on tax collection. They also said it was essential to continue to support Ukraine.
Johnson, who voted against Ukraine aid repeatedly before he became speaker last month, plans to introduce a bill combining assistance for Ukraine with money to increase security at the U.S. border with Mexico.
Arms race: North Korea beats the EU
The meeting between Kim and Putin during the North Korea–Russia summit in April 2019. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, their relations further strengthened. North Korea has repeatedly sent ammunition to Russia
In the race to arm allies, North Korea has beaten the EU to a million artillery shells, Politico states. Meanwhile, the European Union, which also pledged to support Ukraine with a million rounds of ammunition within a year, hasn’t managed to scale up its production to hit that target by March.
The European Commission has delivered 223,800 artillery shells to Ukraine since May 31 under a reimbursement scheme for countries that agreed to dispatch their inventories to Kyiv. Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted recently that deliveries from EU countries are at around 300,000.
Last month, France’s Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said France would be able to send, as of 2024, some 3,000 rounds of critical 155 millimeter ammunition to Kyiv each month, that is, only 36,000 rounds a year. Germany is also able to meet a fraction of Ukraine’s needs: 27,500 155-mm rounds are planned or in execution for delivery, and fewer than 19,000 155-mm explosive shells have already been delivered.
"The 1-million-round ammunition target remains an important political goal," said Peter Stano, a spokesperson for the Commission, adding that ministers would have a chance to return to the goal at a meeting in Brussels on November 14.
Despite the lagging deliveries, Ukraine has for the first time pulled ahead of Russia in how many shells it's firing per day. At the start of the invasion, Moscow’s army was firing 63,000 shells a day at Ukrainian forces compared to just 4,000 coming the other way. But as of October, the tables have turned, with Ukraine launching 9,000 per day against Russia’s 7,000, the Ukrainian armed forces said.
The North Korea deliveries could help Moscow regain the upper hand, adding to its own prodigious production.
The failure to respond to the Ukraine war with a rapid production surge is due in part to a security architecture dating back to the Cold War. Western military planners imagined that a war with the USSR would last just weeks before nuclear weapons were deployed, meaning there was no expectation of the kind of prolonged World War I-style grind now seen in Ukraine.
Annalena Baerbock offers Ukraine "early access" to the benefits of the EU
EU think tanks are already working to develop scenarios for Ukraine and other candidates to join the bloc. However, Ukraine’s accession will be decided by European politicians
Germany has proposed a detailed and innovative roadmap to expand the EU, The Guardian reports. This plan would give candidate countries such as Ukraine early benefits including observer status at leaders’ summits in Brussels before full membership.
The proposals by the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, provide for integrating candidate countries into sections of the EU long before technical negotiations for membership, which can drag on for years, are completed. The minister even said that Germany would be willing to forgo its guaranteed European commissioner post to make room for new arrivals.
Ukraine and Moldova were added last summer to the queue of official candidates comprising Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Turkey, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Next week, a key EU report will be published on their progress, with a decision on formal negotiations expected in December.
Baerbook’s speech focused on how to unblock the accession process, which she said had become a "no-go" subject for some countries due to worries about the expanded budget, the size of the parliament, and decision-making in a bloc of 35 countries.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that he feared the EU enlargement process could be sidetracked by infighting over the budgets and the distribution of positions in the commission and the parliament.
North Macedonia’s foreign minister, Bujar Osmani, supported Baerbock’s propositions, noting that his country, which has been waiting for almost 20 years to join the EU, had experienced all the "flaws" of the accession process.
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