| The Western military alliance NATO has a lot on its plate: Its members have to figure out how to secure defence aid to Ukraine, deal with the impact of China’s relations with Russia, when to use their mutual defence assistance clause Article 5… and how to name new things. We’re talking about the name for NATO’s role in coordinating the delivery of military assistance to Kyiv and training its armed forces. Its goal is largely to prevent Donald Trump, if he returns to the White House, from halting the flow of defence aid to Ukraine by moving that task away from politicians and into the hands of an institution. It could have been easy, but it is not because someone in NATO initially called this coordination platform “The Ukraine Mission”. Without a second thought, the Germans rebelled: We shall not name this platform a “mission”, they said, according to several people familiar with the process. A “mission” for the Germans rings the same way as “troops on the ground”, a move which the country’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz bluntly disagrees with as he does not want the Western military alliance to get involved in the war. But what do you name this thing, then? A framework, a mechanism, a hub, a platform, a command, an initiative, a coordination platform…? The problem is that if “mission” is too much for Berlin, most Russia-hawkish capitals will see any garden-variety term like “mechanism” as simply boring and bureaucratic. In the end, “UNITE” – standing for “Ukraine-NATO Initiative for Training and Equipment” – appears to have won the hard-to-get approval of the 32 members around the table, according to a draft document seen by Euractiv. How many hours of debate it took to come to this, no self-respecting diplomat would probably ever dare to admit. | 