Mr President,
We would like to thank you for making it possible, with the invaluable help of the Netherlands and Denmark, to deploy the first F-16s to Ukraine in the near future. We hope that they will herald the formation of an air force of 200 or 300 aircraft that will enable Ukraine to effectively defend its airspace. Ukraine must be armed.
Without indulging in pessimism or defeatism, it seems to us that the enemy facing Ukraine today has learned from its initial military mistakes, revitalised its military-industrial complex and mastered new types of weaponry. Russia has also been able to find new sources of arms supplies from some of its allies. From this point of view, Iran's delivery of glide bombs and the probable forthcoming supply of medium-range missiles are particularly worrying.
We are writing to you as President of the leading country in the Ramstein coalition to ask you to lift the restrictions on the use of weapons supplied by your country and to invite the coalition member countries to do likewise, so that the Ukrainian army can neutralise military structures and equipment, ammunition and fuel depots and military-industrial complex factories deep inside enemy territory.
In addition, the failure of certain European and American companies to comply with the embargo on the supply of military or dual-use technologies to Russia seems to us to be particularly serious and calls, we believe, for a very firm response which could consist of the creation within NATO of a structure modelled on the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) of the Cold War, responsible for ensuring full compliance with the ban on the export of any sensitive technology to countries representing a real or potential threat to the free world. In addition to Russia, these countries include the People's Republic of China, Iran, North Korea and Belarus.
Mr President, without a much stronger mobilisation than we have seen so far, Ukraine will not be able to win this war and, with it, all the countries in the coalition. Without a shift to a war economy on the part of all Western countries, with the tangible orders to the arms industries that this implies, Moscow's strategy of buying time and banking on the fatigue of governments and public opinion is likely to pay off. We cannot allow this to happen.
Highest regards,
Signataires
Filippos Andrianos, Commodore (ret), Hellenic Navy, Greece
Vincenzo Camporini, General (ret), former Chief of Defence, Italy
Vincent Desportes, General (ret.), former Director of the Centre pour la doctrine et l'emploi des forces (CDEF), Associate Professor at Sciences Po, France
Vicente Díaz de Villegas y Herrería, General (retd), Spanish Army, security and defence analyst, Spain
Eric S. Edelman, Ambassador (ret.), former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 2005-2009, United States
Gert-Johannes Hagemann, Major General (retd), German Army, Berlin, Germany
Willy Herteleer, Admiral (ret), former Belgian Chief of Defence
Ben Hodges, Lieutenant General (ret), former Commander of the US Army in Europe, United States
Anton Hofreiter, Chairman of the European Union Affairs Committee of the Bundestag, Germany
Heribert Hupka, Brigadier General (Retd), German Army, Wachtberg, Germany
Sandra Kalnieté, Member of the European Parliament, former European Commissioner, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Latvia
Roderich Kiesewetter, Member of the Bundestag, Foreign Affairs Representative for the CDU/CSU Group, Germany
David J. Kramer, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, USA
Andrius Kubilius, Member of the European Parliament, former Prime Minister, Lithuania
Vytautas Landsbergis, former President of the Republic, Lithuania
Pandeli Majko, former Prime Minister, Albania
Jean Paul Perruche, General (retd), former Director General of the European Union Military Staff, France
Paolo Puri, Paolo Puri, General (retd), former Military Advisor to the President of the Council of Ministers, Italy
Marc Thys, Lieutenant-General (ret), former Deputy Head of Defence, Belgium
Pekka Toveri, Major General (ret), Member of Parliament, Finland
Translation : For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours!