There is a theory that says President Biden doesn’t actually want Russia to suffer a decisive defeat in the war in Ukraine, The Times reports.
It should be noted that when hostilities began in Ukraine in February 2022, the US (as well as almost all other countries) believed that resistance was futile. Both the Americans and the British offered Zelensky asylum. Boris Johnson, the British prime minister at the time, supplying weapons best suited to guerrilla resistance, recalled how an aide to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told him:
If this [Russian annexation of Ukraine] is going to happen, the best thing is that maybe it should happen quickly.
However, the Ukrainian army did defend itself as best it could. Encouraged, the Americans and Europeans lavished lavish gifts on the Ukrainian armed forces. This despite the fact that Putin warned the West by announcing his “special military operation”, he had said:
Whoever tries to interfere with us … should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history.
Putin added, for those who didn’t get his meaning, that Russia “is today one of the most powerful nuclear states”. The West did intervene, and on an unprecedented scale. But Washington’s fear that Putin might “start a nuclear war” is one reason why it has consistently refused to provide Kyiv with the long-range weapons that would give it the best chance on the front lines. This doesn’t just apply to missile systems that would allow Ukraine to strike military bases in Russia itself.
Germany refuses to supply Kyiv with its Taurus missiles, which could damage Russian infrastructure. Berlin argues that “technical problems” (limiting the range of the missiles so the Ukrainians can’t use them to attack mainland Russia) need to be solved. But as Norbert Röttgen, former chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, observed last month:
The real, highly cynical reason for not delivering these weapons is that they are extremely effective and Scholz fears that the successful use of these weapons could prompt Russian escalation.
Röttgen added that Scholz’s rubric — “Russia must not win; Ukraine must not lose” — carefully avoids any commitment to the idea of Ukrainian victory.
American President Joe Biden, who is careful not to specify his ultimate goal in the conflict, holds the same position. In this context, and given the legislative paralysis over further support for Ukraine in Washington and the EU, the British prime minister’s visit to Kyiv on Friday and pledge of substantial further military assistance should have served as something of an example. Similarly, under Rishi Sunak, Britain was the first of Ukraine’s allies to send main battle tanks, the first to send long-range missiles (Storm Shadow) and the first to start training Ukrainian fighter pilots. Unlike Biden and Scholz, he explicitly stated the need for Ukraine to “win”, according to The Times.
The British – like the Americans – have a special obligation to Ukraine as signatories of the Budapest Memorandum, which in 1994 offered guarantees of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Kyiv’s agreement to surrender the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union.
Last year, Bill Clinton expressed regret that he had forced Kyiv into this agreement when he was president, recalling that the Ukrainians had warned him that these weapons were a guarantee of their sovereignty and security. But Clinton was far more concerned with allaying Moscow’s concerns about its superpower status vis-à-vis the United States, The Times reports.
Going back to the 1990s, the time of Clinton’s immediate predecessor in the White House, may explain Washington’s perennial strategy. In August 1991, President George H. W. Bush visited Kyiv and warned its legislature:
Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism.
Only in November of that year did Washington reluctantly recognise the Ukrainian people’s overwhelming desire for independence from Moscow (formalised the following month by 92.3% of Ukrainian voters in a referendum). As the historian Serhii Plokhy observed in his book The Last Empire — The Final Days of the Soviet Union:
Bush’s policies contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union but they often did so irrespective of the desires of his administration, or even contrary to them.
There is an unspoken fear in Washington today that, in case of a complete defeat in Ukraine, the Russian state will disintegrate. Or, as Richard Hooker, former senior director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council, wrote last month:
There is alarm that a decisive Russian defeat in Ukraine would lead to Putin’s overthrow, with chaos likely to follow … [and] the belief that Russia must be preserved as a major player and crucial element in the international system. Putin does not want a stable international system and is unlikely ever to operate as a responsible player within it.
His article, for the Atlantic Council, is entitled: “The West must decide if it wants Ukraine to win.” Moscow is certainly making it clear: Putin remains adamant that he will not agree to any settlement that does not result in a permanent end to Kyiv’s independence from Moscow – or in the “denazification of Ukraine [and] its demilitarisation”.
It is high time for Joe Biden to make up his mind on this issue. Otherwise, we might conclude that Washington does not share Ukraine’s aspirations for victory.
