Julianne Smith, the US ambassador for NATO spoke about their support for Ukraine during her visit to Brussels. Below is the transcript of the interview
“Russia could stop the war tomorrow if it wanted to and we are trying to apply all the pressure that we can on Moscow to change Putin’s strategic calculus.
Russia is isolated – NATO is moving closer to its borders, NATO is adding new members. It is finding that its own economic indicators are getting weaker and decreasing and so I think Russia will find overtime that this was in essence a strategic failure on so many counts.
In terms of predicting whether or not it’ll be a few more weeks or months or longer than that it’s hard to say. Our focus is again just on supporting those Ukrainian troops so that they can prevail. One thing we’ve learned is that in this conflict progress is not linear we sometimes see Russians gaining territory we often see Ukrainians pushing back on Russian attempts to gain territory.
We will continue to do everything we can to support Ukrainian military on the ground and make sure that they have what they need so that they can prevail in this conflict and stop Russian aggression.
Julianne Smith
Is it possible that finally conflict flows into being frozen? That is one possibility I suppose. We have seen the Russian playbook before in some cases they come in and they take control or they try they attempt to annex territory as they did with Crimea and then they tried to make that annexation a reality.
Trust me the international community will continue to call out any attempts to illegally annex Ukrainian territory we will not tolerate that. We will not stand for it and we certainly will not acknowledge it in any way shape or form. We know and we believe that Russians may try to do that again in the Donbas or somewhere in the east that’s why we’re talking about it now and calling out the Russians on these types of annexation attempts