Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
A single line from a NATO foreign minister in Kyiv did not sit well with the Kremlin.
Poland’s top diplomat used the podium of an international security conference in the Ukrainian capital to lay out, in blunter language than any allied minister has used this year, how a conventional war between NATO and Russia would actually go.
According to Kyiv Post, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told the Yalta European Strategy annual meeting in Kyiv on Saturday that the alliance would “defeat Russia quite quickly” if attacked, citing NATO’s roughly 2,500 aircraft and what he called an overwhelming edge in air power.
For comparison, Russia is estimated to have roughly 300 combat aircraft.
The “gloves off” line
Speaking on a panel titled “Can Europe, Together with Ukraine, Contain Russia?”, Sikorski told the audience that if Moscow struck a NATO country and the alliance responded without restraint, “If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly.”
He argued the arithmetic favored the West on aircraft numbers and deep-strike weapons, adding: “Even without the US it’s still overwhelming, and I haven’t checked recently how many F-35s and JASSMs and all the deep-strike capabilities we have.”
He extended the point to Russia’s oil industry, which has been battered by Ukrainian long-range drone strikes since summer.
If Ukrainians had knocked out roughly half of Russia’s refining capacity in six months, he said, European militaries could finish the other half in six weeks.
Sikorski also noted that the combined defense budgets of the Baltic states and Nordic countries alone now exceed Russia’s.
Moscow’s same-weekend answer
The Kremlin waited barely a day to answer.
On Sunday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova answered on her Telegram channel with three words: “Russophobia of the brain.”
She had used the same “condition” days earlier to describe what she cast as a broader mood in Western political circles that now, in her telling, reached Warsaw as well.
Zakharova’s post, republished the next morning by Russian state outlet Sputnik, was Moscow’s sharpest reply yet to a NATO foreign minister’s public wartime assessment. Sputnik characterized Sikorski’s remarks as “fantasy” and “bravado.”
The YES annual meeting, organized by Ukrainian businessman Victor Pinchuk’s foundation, brought European and Ukrainian officials to Kyiv on September 11 and 12 under heightened Russian air attacks along the Polish border.
