It is always disappointing to discover that Wunderwaffen do not exist, especially when you have relied on them to win a war against Russia.
It is therefore unsurprising that the frustration implicit in former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhny’s claim that Russia found countermeasures to nearly every NATO weapon supplied to Ukraine since 2022 has made media waves.
But his argument that NATO must now reinvent itself raises a question: what exactly for?
NATO’s policy toward Russia
On the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, neither the US nor NATO showed much willingness to confront Russia directly. Western officials understood perfectly well that Moscow’s demands, which included reversing NATO’s post-Soviet enlargement, were a negotiation strategy designed to fail.
Nevertheless, Washington continued holding talks with Russia behind closed doors. Then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva in January 2022, though in vain.
But was NATO particularly concerned about defending Ukraine?
My conversations at the time were revealing. One senior NATO official told me that he did not believe a full-scale invasion would occur and expected another escalation in the Donbas instead – a scenario to which, quite frankly, I sensed little serious objection.
Nothing I heard during my reporting and travels subsequently that year suggested that the Alliance was especially concerned about its own security. With the exception of NATO’s eastern flank which did not wish for Kyiv to fall, the Alliance itself chose the strategy of staying away from the immediate massacre and remained reluctant to provide Ukraine with what officials described as lethal weapons rather than defensive assistance.
NATO was undoubtedly supportive rhetorically. In practice, however, it continued pursuing its own strategic priorities. One result of Russia’s invasion was the accession of Finland and Sweden, which then-US President Joe Biden and former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed with open arms.
But that enthusiasm was non-existent in Ukraine’s case: when Kyiv submitted its accelerated NATO membership bid in September 2022, I spoke again with the same senior official who told me: “Your bid changes nothing anyway.”
The NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Bucharest later that year reinforced this impression. It took place as Russian strikes expectedly pounded Kyiv’s energy grid and the Biden administration continued its refusal to provide Patriot systems to Ukraine.
New York Times journalist Steven Erlanger asked Stoltenberg whether Ukraine had earned NATO membership rather than more vague promises. Stoltenberg replied that the immediate priority was ensuring Ukraine survived as a sovereign state. Membership would have to come later, “step by step” – without telling which steps – while the Biden administration representatives I interviewed kept saying that the war would end tomorrow if Russia simply stopped.
But you know Russia won’t stop, so why say that?
All these opaque statements at the time ultimately begged the question of how exactly you win a war when those controlling much of your weapons supply have never committed to your victory?
Take the 31 M1 Abrams tanks supplied to Ukraine. No serious person could believe that 31 tanks, together with several German Leopards, would fundamentally alter the course of a continental war.
And they did not: By April 2024, Ukraine had pulled some Abrams tanks from frontline use because Russian drones had made them increasingly vulnerable. Damaged and captured Western vehicles, including an Abrams, were subsequently displayed by Russia in Moscow.
The failed 2023 counteroffensive undoubtedly cost Ukraine dear but it was also a security miscalculation by the West. States must assume that anything used in war may eventually fall into enemy hands, which is why sending weapons in quantities too small to produce a decisive effect still exposes them to capture and technical examination.
That calculation helps explain unpopular decisions such as Israel’s refusal to transfer Iron Dome systems to Ukraine. Israel wanted to avoid confrontation with Russia, particularly in Syria, but it also feared that sensitive technology could reach Iran, an understandable concern that may also in part apply to Biden’s reported refusal and US President Donald Trump’s hesitance to provide Patriot licences to Ukraine.
It’s the sheer quantity, stupid
Yet, knowing an enemy’s weapons does not necessarily mean being able to defeat its military.
Russia may have developed countermeasures to Western weapons used in Ukraine, like Zaluzhny said, but that does not mean NATO’s military potential has been exhausted.
A few Mirage fighters operating from Ukrainian airfields are not equivalent to hundreds of allied aircraft supported by tankers, satellites, airborne warning systems, electronic warfare, cruise missiles and a coordinated campaign to suppress Russian air defenses.
If NATO ever had to fight Russia directly, it would rely on sheer quantity, integration and the speed of production—not a Wunderwaffe. The Alliance spent an estimated $1.3 trillion on defense in 2024, with the Trump administration making the 5% spending benchmark even more pronounced. It would not send one or two aircraft to conduct carefully restricted missions somewhere over southern Ukraine.
Besides, Russia’s Soviet era-designed arsenal is hardly a mystery to NATO either.
But the real question is why would it?
Russia’s ambition to test NATO’s resolve isn’t impossible, but the larger picture of the West’s attitude toward Moscow has been intact over the years.
Whatever Biden’s public rhetoric – including calling Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin a “butcher” – his administration defined the US objective as a democratic, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine capable of defending itself and deterring further aggression, not restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity to the full. Biden also explicitly said that the US did not seek a war between NATO and Russia, nor did it intend to prolong the conflict merely to inflict pain on Moscow.
He refused to back Ukraine’s NATO membership at the Vilnius summit in 2023 and Washington DC summit in 2024, resorting to, what I call, “Merriam Webster wordplays” of changing wording in NATO’s communiques instead. All while Washington also simultaneously pressed Kyiv to demonstrate openness to negotiations.
In November 2022, the Biden administration privately encouraged Ukrainian leaders to reconsider their public refusal to negotiate while Putin remained in power.
At roughly the same time, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was holding undisclosed talks with senior Russian officials to manage escalation and prevent the war from expanding.
The Trump administration, which outright shelved Ukraine’s largely non-existent NATO membership prospects altogether and started negotiating with Moscow over Kyiv’s head, has simply brought much of this attitude into public view as part of its non-embellished real politik approach, the lack of desire to aid those they believe to be “doomed” anyway, and Trump’s idiosyncrasies.
Yet, NATO and the West’s bet remains largely the same: wait it all out – mainly by expecting the present arrangement to contain Russia until its military is exhausted, its economy deteriorates or Putin passes away – all while they continue negotiating with Russian officials either openly or secretly.
Is there morality in that? No.
But morality has never been a reliable organizing principle of great-power policy.