By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

NATO And Artikel Five

The past 24 hours have shown how delicate the situation could become on Ukraine’s borders with Nato countries, including Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, and Romania. Since the Russian invasion at the end of February, the big fear for the west’s most important military alliance is that hostilities could spill over into one of those countries, forcing Nato to intervene and become embroiled in the conflict.

These fears have surfaced again after a Russian-made missile landed on the village of Przewodów a few miles inside the Polish border on November 15, killing two farmers. This immediately led to frantic speculation that the missile could have been launched by Russia, which could have led Poland to invoke Article 5 of the Nato treaty.

Article 5 does not demand a military response from Nato member states. But they are mandated to “assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”

                                                             

Scrambling For The Facts

President Joe Biden was asleep on the other side of the world when aides woke him up in the middle of the night there with urgent news: a missile had struck Poland and killed two people.

By 5:30 am local time in Bali, where the president was attending the G20 summit, Biden, still in a t-shirt and khakis, was on the phone with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda seeking clarity on where the missile had come from – a critical fact due to the potentially dire implications of a Russian missile strike on a NATO ally.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was traveling with Biden, had also been roused with a knock on the door by his body man around 4 a.m. local time with news of the explosion, a US official said – news that most US officials only discovered from public reports and conversations with Polish officials.

After several anxious hours, Biden was the first to relieve some of the tension, telling reporters that initial information suggested Russia did not launch the missile.

 

But The Incident Has Also Created Some Cracks In The West’s Alliance With Ukraine.

By Wednesday, multiple senior US officials were publicly saying that intelligence pointed to the explosion from a Ukrainian air defense missile that landed in Poland accidentally. An official said that the US had also shared the classified information with allies before Wednesday morning’s North Atlantic Council meeting at NATO headquarters.

Zelensky, on Wednesday afternoon, insisted that Ukrainian forces did not launch the missile. He told reporters in Kyiv, “I do not doubt that it was not our missile,” citing reports he had received from the command of the Ukrainian armed forces and the Air Force.

Zelensky also expressed frustration that Ukrainian officials had not been permitted to join the joint Polish-US investigation of the site and said he wanted to see “the number on the missile because all missiles have numbers on them.”

But Zelensky concluded on Thursday that he did not fully know what had happened in Poland. 

                                                            

The Polish Viewpoint

If the conflict in Ukraine is rewriting the history of central and eastern Europe, then so is the history of the north Atlantic alliance.

Two people were killed on Tuesday evening in Polish territory, struck, it seems, by a Russian-made missile. The US president, Joe Biden, and the Warsaw government sought to dial down the tension, saying on Wednesday that the missile most probably came not from Russia but from Ukrainian air defense.

The question for Poland, however, remains, as it would for any Nato member state, especially one living in Russia’s shadow: what if this, or a similar incident, turned out to be a deliberate Russian operation after all? What protection could it expect from the US and its other Nato allies?

Under Article 5 of the Nato treaty, an armed attack on one ally is regarded as an attack on all. But what constitutes an armed attack? And what would Nato solidarity mean in practice? The answer that Poland and other smaller Nato members (as well as the Kremlin) are learning would appear to be “it depends”.

The possibility of a Russian missile landing on Polish soil or on the territory of one of the Baltic states, either by accident or by design, has hung over the Ukraine crisis for nine months. In the disinformation age, one could imagine Moscow owning up to an “accident” and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, with a characteristically sinister smile, expressing “regret.”

So at what point does a Nato member get to claim that it needs to invoke Article 5’s protection, as the organization’s territorial integrity has been violated? Russia has violated Scandinavian – Danish and Swedish – airspace on countless occasions. But Nato’s supposedly impassable red lines appear mutable when nuclear-armed global conflict is at stake.

For the citizens of Poland, who now have two dead compatriots, “it depends” begins to sound as if the line between war and peace is being deliberately blurred. In the coming days and weeks, Russia’s immediate neighborhood will find out what Nato membership and US military support is worth.

A forensic investigation into the circumstances of Tuesday’s incident is essential. But the problem remains. The cool heads of diplomats will. We must hope and continue to prevent a dangerous escalation. But don’t be surprised if hotheads in the urban and rural areas bordering Russia react differently. What, they now ask, if another missile strays into Nato territory, killing more civilians?

The collective fear reawakened across eastern Europe by this war is visceral. Our recurring nightmare is of Russian troops and weapons breaching the Polish border again, as they have done many times over the past 300 years. In a survey conducted after Russia invaded Ukraine, 84% of Polish citizens said they feared the war could spill into Poland. I think about it every day, one man living on the Polish-Russian border. “They could come any time. Kill us in our beds.”

For most eastern Europeans, the war in Ukraine is seen not as a single event but as a process of creeping and always escalating Russian aggression. This view reflects a particular fatalism and distrust of our western allies. And while the reaction of the Polish government has been profoundly measured, social media reactions show that many citizens are convinced that the situation has just turned their fears into facts. Anxieties that lives could be lost because of the war, including those living on Polish territory, have now proved tragically justified.

These regional fears translate into an expected outcome of the war. For many Poles, like their neighbors in the Baltic states, there are only two acceptable scenarios in the wake of the Ukraine war. The first is the utter destruction and defeat of Putin’s Russia, similar to Germany’s wipeout in 1945. And if this is not an option, they want at least a repeat of 1991, the collapse of the Russian empire. There is no third way.

 

Conclusion

There is no question that Ukraine deserves an ample voice in determining its fate, but the outside powers supporting Ukraine also get a voice. “Standing with Ukraine” does not and should not mean placing our interests and concerns on hold, significantly when they do not always overlap with Kyiv’s interests or objectives. No responsible world leader can or should sacrifice their country’s interests for another’s, and a good ally tells its partners if it thinks they are acting unwisely.

Nor should we; first of all, we should not forget that “accidental” or “inadvertent” escalation is neither the only nor the most likely way this war could expand and get more deadly. States at war typically escalate not because the other side breaches some critical threshold or misreads something the other side has done but because they are losing. That is why Germany adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I and used V-1 and V-2 rockets in World War II, why Japan began employing kamikaze attacks in the Pacific War, and why the United States invaded Cambodia in 1970.

This dynamic is already at work in Ukraine today. What began as a “special military operation” expected to last a few days or weeks has become a major war of attrition with no end. After repeated setbacks, Russia mobilized several hundred thousand more troops (a step Putin did not expect to take when he started the war). It is now waging a deliberate campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure. At the same time, Ukraine’s allies have ramped up their diplomatic, economic, and military support. There is nothing “accidental” about this process; escalation is occurring because neither side is ready to negotiate a settlement, and each side wants to win and certainly not lose.

It is easy to understand Ukraine’s position: The Ukrainians are fighting for survival. Our sympathies and material support are with them, and rightly so. But because Americans are accustomed to blaming the world’s problems on the evil nature of autocratic leaders, they have more trouble recognizing that Putin and his associates believe that their vital interests are also at stake. To acknowledge that reality is not a defense of what Putin has ordered or a justification of what the Russian military has done to Ukraine; it is simply a reminder that Moscow didn’t go to war for its amusement and isn’t likely to accept defeat easily.

Unfortunately, this situation highlights both why ending the war is desirable and why doing so faces enormous obstacles. If the war goes on, the danger of more dangerous incidents and the danger of a deliberate decision to escalate will remain uncomfortably high. Furthermore, we cannot be confident that future incidents will be properly interpreted or that the temptations to raise the stakes will always be resisted. Those who have called for greater attention to diplomacy and more serious efforts to settle are correct in emphasizing the perils that remain as long as the bullets and missiles are flying.

But negotiations are no panacea; indeed, it is hard to be optimistic about the prospects of diplomacy working. Ukraine has considerable momentum on the battlefield, but there’s no sign that Moscow is ready to compromise, let alone meet all of Ukraine’s demands. If both sides believe they can improve their situation by fighting, no deal is possible.

 

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