As NATO Gathers in Washington, Ukrainians Have a Grave Warning to the West
Moscow's bombing of children's and maternity hospitals in Ukraine has given a dry diplomatic summit a terrifying urgency
Patients during Russian rocket attack on a children’s hospital on July 8.
Beginning this evening, Western leaders will gather in Washington for two days for the 75th anniversary of NATO, the mutual defense pact that has protected its members against a Russian attack since its founding. Since 2022, Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO, has been fighting off a full-scale invasion by Russia. At the summit, Western allies will likely announce bilateral arms deliveries to Ukraine and an agreement for NATO to take over the coordination of arms deliveries to Ukraine from the U.S., which faces the possibility of a second term of Donald Trump, who is a skeptic of NATO and Ukraine aid.
The central diplomatic question will be what language will be agreed upon for Ukraine to eventually join the alliance. While NATO has made it clear that Kyiv cannot join while it is at war, the language for Ukraine joining at a future date will be closely scrutinized; Western officials hope to avoid last year's blowup, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky blasted the annual summit's communique on social media for being too weak.
On the day before the summit, 5,000 miles away in Ukraine, Moscow killed at least 39 people in air attacks. Moscow launched missiles at a children's hospital and a maternity hospital in the capital, Kyiv. These bombings are war crimes: they hit civilian targets filled with mothers and children with cancer. And they weren't accidents: missile experts contacted by the New York Times said the targeting was intentional. The attack wasn't a surprise: the last time I was in Kyiv in April, the children's hospital was evacuated during an air raid due to social media threats. But this air raid was not a false alarm: it became the most deadly attack in Kyiv since at least January. (The capital is better protected by Western air defenses than any other Ukrainian city.)
The diplomatic language coming out of the summit will be heavily scrutinized. However, inside of Ukraine, a more urgent message has surfaced in the wake of the attacks: give us all of the weapons and air defense systems we need to win -- now. While giving Ukraine the military aid to survive, U.S. and European countries have debated over which kinds of aid to send and what restrictions to put on it, fearing nuclear escalation by Moscow. In the U.S., Trump's promise to end the war in "24 hours" has ratcheted up fears of the U.S. halting military aid to Ukraine if it doesn't surrender wide swaths of its territory to Moscow.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, posted on X that the summit "must urgently decide how to provide Ukraine with air defense systems and the necessary number of missiles for them." She added, "While delegations greet each other at the summit, in Ukraine, people are saying farewell to the killed on a day of mourning." After the attacks, I was texting with Alina Sviderska, President of the Cambridge Society of Ukraine and who led a group of German journalists and I on a recent trip to the country. She said, “What else needs to happen so that the world finally recognizes Russia as a terrorist state and gives Ukraine all possible air defense and weapons?” She warned: “If terror works, then today it was a kids' hospital in Kyiv. Tomorrow it will be somewhere else in Europe. The terrorist will say 'we will stop killing your kids if you give us part of your territory,' and then it will be a never-ending loop of terror."
Please excuse my ignorance but I do not understand how targeting a pediatric hospital on the eve of a NATO summit serves Putin well. Is there's some deeper strategy that someone like me could not understand that would make that a good idea? I would guess there is more to the story. Is there?