Zelensky and Cameron criss-cross Continent in race to replace Yankee cash

(Originally published Feb. 14 in “What in the World“) With right-wing Republicans still holding U.S. military aid to Ukraine hostage to anti-immigration concerns, Volodymyr Zelensky is looking to Europe to fill the gap.

The Ukrainian President embarks on a whirlwind tour of the continent this week with stops in Berlin, Paris, and possibly London ahead of a regional security conference in Munich. Ukrainian forces have reportedly had to begin rationing ammunition as they try to fend off Russian advances in eastern Donetsk province and weather Russian drone and missile barrages against Ukrainian cities. Moscow may have also deployed its hypersonic cruise missile against Ukraine.

As Zelensky goes one way to Munich, British foreign secretary David Cameron will be going the other. Cameron is planning visits to Bulgaria and Poland to drum up further support for Ukraine. Cameron went to Washington in December to try to convince Republicans to stop blocking U.S. aid to Ukraine. Worked about as well as his efforts to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union.

A bipartisan group of senators managed on Tuesday to push a $95 billion military aid bill through the U.S. Senate, but the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House of Representatives. Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated he won’t even put the bill to a vote.

Estonia, meanwhile, warns that Russia is preparing for a military confrontation with the West in the next decade. As indication, Moscow is doubling the number of troops it has positioned on the border with the Baltic states and Finland—the newest member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This may come as no surprise to anyone in Europe, since it was the belief in Russia’s growing threat that prompted Finland to chuck decades of “buffering” to join NATO. And certainly not to anyone in Russia, either, where President Vladimir Putin has for years been fulminating against how NATO’s expansion poses an existential threat to Russia—and used it to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As the world continues to become a scarier, more unpredictable place, governments are plunking more and more money down on weapons to make it scarier and more unpredictable. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that global military spending rose in 2023 to a record $2.2 trillion. The United States alone accounted for 41% of that total. China? Ten percent.