The NATO summit in Ankara was "an exercise in papering over the cracks in the increasing chasm between Europe and the United States," General Sir Richard Shirreff told Euromaidan Press.
The verdict carries weight because of where Shirreff sits. He was NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the alliance's second-highest military post, from 2011 to 2014. Since April he has been chief foreign military adviser to Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's commander-in-chief, and chairs the ARES Military Expert Council that advises him. He is indicting the alliance from inside the army it is arming.
His assessment cuts against the establishment read of Ankara. The summit pledged Ukraine roughly €140 billion ($160 billion) in military aid across 2026 and 2027 and produced its headline offer—a US license for Ukraine to build its own Patriot interceptors—which the Atlantic Council judged had "added to the pressure on Putin."
"Lets America off the hook"
Shirreff's sharpest objection is to that license. It "lets America off the hook concerning all the complaints about not supporting Ukraine," he said—an announcement that answers the criticism without answering the shortage.
He allows a second reading, less cynical and no more comforting: Washington may simply not have the interceptors. After the US-Israeli war on Iran drained much of the world's stockpile, Shirreff said, America "doesn't have the means to provide Ukraine with Patriot now." On that reading the license defers deliveries because it cannot do otherwise.
Either way the gap stays open. The Patriot is the Western system that most reliably stops Russian ballistic missiles, and Ukraine depends on the United States almost exclusively for it. In the strikes of 6 July, Ukrainian air defenses downed none of the nearly 30 ballistic missiles Russia fired, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.
A failure of will, not capability
Shirreff credits Ankara with gains, the renewed Article 5 pledge among them. But the summit, in his telling, preserved the appearance of transatlantic unity without resolving Washington's unreliability or Europe's failure to build its own strategy for defeating Russia. The failure is political, not military. NATO's leaders would rather keep Donald Trump on side than tell him plainly what Ukraine needs.
The plan he has pressed for years, Sky Shield, would put European NATO aircraft over western and central Ukraine to shoot down Russian drones and cruise missiles—freeing Ukraine's scarce Patriot interceptors for the ballistic missiles only they can stop. Ankara did nothing to advance it.
"I just don't think it's changed the dial whatsoever," Shirreff said.
He has been saying versions of this to Euromaidan Press for months, including in a June interview in which he argued that only Russia's defeat ends the war.
Why the Patriot license cannot close Ukraine's interceptor gap, and what the specialists say a real answer would require, is the subject of our analysis of the Ankara Patriot promise.
