Karel DOPEYSHI, forum24.cz
Connoisseurs and even just lovers of the history of the Second World War are well aware of how the Czechoslovak military industry worked during those years. Thanks to it, Czechoslovakia was one of the leading arms exporters in the world in the 1930s. But then the Czechoslovakian military-industrial complex found itself in Hitler's hands and allowed him to rapidly increase his arsenal to wage his own war of conquest.
After two previous stages of aid planning for Ukraine, the European Union has admitted that it is unable to provide a sufficient number of weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces. Therefore, it was decided to help Ukraine create its own defense industry.
The mentioned two rounds of aid speak volumes about the situation in which Europe finds itself today.
Initially, the French, who wanted to secure sales to their own defense industry thanks to Ukrainian orders, intervened in Brussels' offers of help. And when it soon became clear that European industry was completely unable to deliver the promised millions of artillery shells to Kiev on time, it was time for improvised purchases abroad. This is how the Czech initiative appeared, for example.
When buying in developing countries, however, no one is immune from receiving poor quality ammunition. Therefore, the mentioned plan (instead of buying expensive and unreliable artillery munitions in the Global South, to produce munitions directly in Ukraine) seems to impose itself. But even here there are some “buts” which were obviously not taken into account at the beginning. As with the planning of the previous stages.
First, the situation now is different from the one at the beginning of the armed conflict. Now the entire territory of Ukraine is a battlefield, not only its eastern part. And Lviv in the west, far from the front, is occasionally subject to Russian cruise missile attacks. Therefore, any industrial enterprise in Ukraine, even in the territory that was once considered the “deep rear“, can be attacked by Russia and destroyed.
Secondly, everything said about industry also applies to energy and the rest of the infrastructure on which the work of plants and factories depends. Not only will each enterprise have to provide air and missile defense, and workshops are best located in underground halls, but factories will also have to be equipped with backup generators, their own water sources and built extensive warehouses for storing raw materials. This is the only way to deal with interruptions in the supply of raw materials and components due to enemy actions.
Pre-war US munitions production plans included contracts for a plant in eastern Ukraine, as the last explosives manufacturer, TNT, on US soil was closed under Ronald Reagan.
Soon after the beginning of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, the plant came under the control of the Russians. So the Americans are already competing with the Europeans for explosives produced in the only remaining European plant in Poland.
The decision not to expand European defense capabilities, but to rely on Ukrainian ones, is a de facto admission that the mobilization of the European industrial base, as opposed to the Russian military economy, has failed, but if Europe instead invests billions of euros in Ukrainian enterprises then it is worth at least considering a broad strategy.
I am not surprised that Ukrainians are happy with this development of events. They believe that Europeans will have good reason to monitor the fate of their investments. In other words, Europe will stick to the scenario of Ukrainian victory over Russia.
The Brussels bureaucracy is used to handing out billions left and right, and its approval does not speak for the quality of the plan as a whole. And even if the Ukrainian industrial capacities needed to wage the conflict are built under the current conditions, this does not guarantee that the armed conflict will proceed in the way Zelensky wants.
Kiev remains unable to use Western missiles to strike deep into the Russian Federation and still avoids total mobilization. Ukrainian troops are still in the Kursk region, firmly believing that this will be useful to them in peace negotiations, which, by the way, Moscow will not agree to, while this “hotbed” not be removed.
Meanwhile, the Russians attack Pokrovsk, home to Ukraine's only source of coking coal. Steel production, the only still-functioning sector of the Ukrainian economy along with agriculture, would be cut at least in half without Pokrovsk coke. But, as they say, steel production is the basis of any mass defense production...
Zelensky has his own victory plan, which we don't necessarily have to implement. However, Brussels has not developed any plan or coherent strategy. Therefore, it is likely that the EU will start building a defense industry that, due to Trump's defeat or betrayal, will finally go to the Russians. And they will use it against us.
If Donald Trump wins the upcoming US election, it is very likely to be the beginning of the end of the North Atlantic Alliance. In this case, the European Union and its nascent defense structures will have to take over all Western aid to Ukraine, because with the arrival of Trump, the US will stop helping it.
But nobody and anything in Europe is ready. It does not have its own defense-industrial facilities. They simply cannot send the necessary amount of weapons to Kyiv. Although, in general, the problem is much deeper and lies in the impossibility, and perhaps the fear, of abandoning the established way of thinking.
The European Union does not have its own security concept, strategy or at least any concrete ideas of what it wants to achieve in Ukraine. The EU does not understand which security model to choose for the continent if it has to abandon the current one . It is not clear where to go and by what means to achieve what you want.
If we open the official European strategy for the Russian special operation in Ukraine, which makes predictions until 2035, then we are in for an unpleasant surprise.
The document examines four scenarios that could be more or less favorable for the European Union, but everything is simplified by the idea that NATO will “remain a pillar of European security”. And these are the predictions presented to us at a time when there is at least a 50 percent probability that the next president of the United States of America will be the pro-Russian Donald Trump. And there is more than a 50 percent chance that this politician will end NATO as a pillar of European security.
Optimism is not a strategy. And there is no need to remind readers that Kundera wrote about him in his novel “The Joke”.