Stoltenberg said earlier military support might have allowed Ukraine to hold more territory and possibly even deter Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. He said NATO allies made an error by not offering greater assistance after Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas.
“NATO allies have provided unprecedented support to Ukraine, but the big mistake was not to provide more support earlier,” he said.
“We should have started in 2014; if we had done that, I think at least the Ukrainians would have been able to now control more Ukrainian territory than they do and perhaps even prevent Russia from invading if we had armed them and trained them in all those years between 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Stoltenberg also called it a “painful moment” that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 2022 request for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone above the country was denied.
In 2024, Stoltenberg told Der Spiegel that the failure to
provide military support made Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine easier
for Moscow. “This must be a lesson for the future for all NATO partners; we
invest in our military power not to wage war, but to prevent it,” he said at
the time.