US Support to Ukraine
Whitewashing Biden's record
In an interview with the New York Times on January 2, Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked to whitewash the Biden administration’s record of supporting Ukraine, claiming the administration’s policies of “diplomacy first” have made America “stronger.”
I disagree.
By working to avoid direct conflict first and help Ukraine second, the Biden administration showed Putin it was scared of Russia’s nuclear threats, pusillanimously imposing sanctions pressure on Russia, while giving Moscow ways to circumvent the restrictions and continue funding its savage offensive against the Ukrainian people.
We made sure that well before the Russian aggression happened, starting in September and then again December, we quietly got a lot of weapons to Ukraine to make sure that they had in hand what they needed to defend themselves, things like Stingers, Javelins that were instrumental in preventing Russia from taking Kyiv, from rolling over the country, erasing it from the map, and indeed pushing the Russians back.
Russian aggression against Ukraine happened in 2014 when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and funded and supported separatist aggression in eastern Ukraine. Let’s not pretend otherwise. So, no - the Biden administration did NOT provide the needed support to Ukraine before the Russian aggression happened. Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama did nothing of the sort either.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Obama administration provided non-lethal security assistance to Ukraine, according to the Congressional Research Service. It was the Trump administration that in 2017 announced that the United States was ready to provide lethal assistance to Ukraine.
The United States stands with the Ukrainian people and their choice of democracy, reform, and European integration, the Obama White House declared after the 2014 invasion.
In pursuit of these objectives, Vice President Joe Biden announced today in Kyiv, Ukraine that, pending approval from Congress, the White House will commit $20 million to support comprehensive reform in the Ukrainian law enforcement and justice sectors, including prosecutorial and anti-corruption reforms. The Vice President also announced that the U.S. will be directing an additional $3 million to the UN World Food Program emergency operation in Ukraine for food rations and assistance to people displaced by the conflict in eastern Ukraine and other vulnerable populations.
I’m sure the help was appreciated, but let’s not pretend this was anything than appeasement to Russia.
As the Brookings Institution wrote in 2018, let’s not try to rehabilitate Obama’s response to Russia’s aggression.
But not everything is relative; we should not slip into collective amnesia over the Obama administration’s weak and underwhelming response to Russian aggression. Throughout his presidency, Obama consistently underestimated the challenge posed by Putin’s regime. His foreign policy was firmly grounded in the premise that Russia was not a national security threat to the United States. In 2012, Obama disparaged Mitt Romney for exaggerating the Russian threat—“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped. This breezy attitude prevailed even as Russia annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria, and hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Obama’s response during these critical moments was cautious at best, and deeply misguided at worst. Even the imposition of sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by so much propitiation and restraint elsewhere that it didn’t deter Russia from subsequent aggression, including the risky 2016 influence operation in the United States. Obama, confident that history was on America’s side, for the duration of his time in office underestimated the damaging impact Russia could achieve through asymmetric means.
Russia in 2014 had already started issuing nuclear threats, and because we didn’t do enough to stop Putin a decade ago, he felt emboldened to stage a full-scale invasion. Sure, we issued sanctions in response to the invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea. Sure, we created a Ukraine-related sanctions regime that would designate those threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Sure, we created sectoral sanctions in response to Russia’s Crimea invasion.
But the idea that Putin’s calculus was going to be changed by sanctioning a few Russian oligarchs and imposing debt and equity restrictions on certain sectors of the Russian economy was and is absurd.
The Biden administration in a lot of ways continued the Obama administration’s lack of gravitas on Russia. Although some support was provided prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion, the limits Washington placed on Kyiv, even as the savage Russian invasion ground on, destroying families, kidnapping children, mutilating and torturing innocent people, and targeting civilians, showed the White House’s fear of providing real, tangible, effective support to Ukraine.
Right before Russia rolled on into Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration did provide intelligence support, as well as some offensive weapons to Kyiv.
But the limited authorization for Ukraine to use US-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia didn’t come until this past November - after the North Koreans sent troops to support Russian aggression in Ukraine. Before that, the White House tremulously authorized Kyiv to fire US weapons inside Russia—solely near the area of Kharkiv.
Because you know… escalation.
And the United States warned Ukraine to be sure NOT to fire US weapons at civilian infrastructure, despite the fact that this is exactly what the Kremlin was doing to Ukraine. Blinken even implied in his interview that Ukraine may have been too incompetent to use US weapons against solely military targets.
What we’ve had to look at each and every time is not only should we give this to the Ukrainians but do they know how to use it? Can they maintain it? Is it part of a coherent plan? All of those things factored into the decisions we made on what to give them and when to give it.
Well, the Russians certainly didn’t care that they struck civilian infrastructure, killed women, children, and the elderly, destroyed churches, apartment buildings, and hospitals, and bombed innocent people. In fact, the Russians very intentionally targeted first responders to ensure Ukraine had no resources to treat its wounded.
Despite numerous Russian war crimes and targeting of innocent people in Ukraine, the fear of escalation was palpable in this White House, ignoring the fact that Russia has been impotently waggling its nuclear member since they rolled into Ukraine and long before, showing those threats to be empty at the very least.
Putin, a few days after the invasion began, ordered his military to put Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces on high alert. This wasn’t in response to the West’s ostensible “escalation.” This was in anticipation that the West would do something in response to Russia’s aggression.
After US Secretary of State Blinken met with Ukrainian president Zelensky in April of that year, Russia again threatened nuclear action by claiming there was a “real danger” of World War III. Putin also issued a similar “veiled” threat that month. “If anyone sets out to intervene in the current events from the outside and creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature, they should know that our response … will be lightning-fast… We have all the tools for this, that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it. We’ll use them, if needed. And I want everyone to know that.”
Similar threats have been issued by members of the Duma periodically throughout that year and in 2023 and 2024, as well as by many times an obviously drunk Dmitry Medvedev.
And let’s not forget that the Biden administration slow-rolled military aid to Ukraine so much, that only 10 percent of help authorized by Congress last April had reached Kyiv by October.
The fact that Blinken is now working to portray the Biden administration as Ukraine’s “savior” gives those of us who have been following the events of Russian aggression in Ukraine since 2014 and its aggression against its neighbors earlier than that heartburn. The fact that Blinken is nearly spraining his shoulder patting himself on the back about how hard he worked to prevent the full-scale invasion shows how desperate he is to paint the Biden administration as Ukraine’s best friend and supporter.
I worked very hard in the lead up to the war, including meetings with my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva a couple of months before the war, trying to find a way to see if we could prevent it, trying to test the proposition whether this was really about Russia’s concerns for its security, concerns somehow about Ukraine and the threat that it posed, or NATO and the threat that it posed, or whether this was about what it in fact it is about, which is Putin’s imperial ambitions and the desire to recreate a greater Russia, to subsume Ukraine back into Russia. But we had to test that proposition. And we were intensely engaged diplomatically with Russia.
What was there to test, exactly? Putin’s own words should have revealed exactly what Russia’s ambitions were. Putin’s 2021 essay on Ukraine should have shown the Biden administration exactly what Russia’s imperial ambitions were, with claims that Russia and Ukraine are one nation and that modern Ukraine is “entirely the product of the Soviet era” and that Kyiv “doesn’t need” Donbas, as if Russia somehow is the arbiter of a sovereign nation’s needs.
The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.
But Blinken and crew somehow had to conduct some experimental analysis to see if Russia viewed NATO and the United States as a genuine threat or if Putin merely wanted to gobble up and subsume Ukraine?
Spare me!
Dr. Andrew Michta of the Atlantic Council said it best in his testimony to the Helsinki Commission last October.
Blinken’s interview strikes me as an attempt to camouflage the abject failure of the United States to stop a much weaker Russia from working to realize its imperial ambitions as Biden prepares to leave office. The Biden administration had an opportunity to stop Putin - something that both Obama and Trump failed to do. And thanks to Biden’s puttering, Putin was able to paint himself as the leader of a mighty держава (power) that strikes fear into its much stronger adversaries.
After all, the EU was heavily dependent on Russian energy, and the United States was too hesitant to impose a hardship on its European allies by sanctioning Russian energy. Heck, it took the EU two years to finally impose sanctions on Russia’s state-owned diamond producer Alrosa because of pressure from the Belgian diamond industry.
Putin sensed weakness, and he struck. In return, instead of a “maximum pressure” campaign that would have cut Russia off from the global financial system, cutting drastically its resources to conduct its war in Ukraine and enforcement efforts to stop Moscow from exploiting third countries and loopholes, the Biden administration slow-walked aid, created loopholes to allow Russia to access resources to fund its aggression in Ukraine, and tied Ukraine’s hands to ensure that no significant targets were hit in Russia, while Moscow continued to savage the country and its people.
Biden’s appeasement didn’t make America “stronger.” It showed Putin just how weak and ineffective we are, scared to cut Russia off from the global financial system, bowing to fickle “allies” who continue to suck up Russian energy and pour blood money into Putin’s pockets, and issuing licenses and waivers to allow Russia’s energy and payments that fund the murder of Ukrainian civilians to continue.
No one is fooled by your efforts to rehabilitate the Biden administration’s failures vis-a-vis Ukraine, Mr. Blinken. Get over yourself.
The Kremlin doesn't have in its calculus "we'll do more if the US tries to fight back," in fact it is likely the opposite. Biden's crew is viewing this as USA vs USSR still. It's not the Cold War anymore. The Kremlin going after Ukraine is more like the pre-Soviet Russian Empire trying to expand to keep the empire afloat. It might be driven by Putin's insecurity that others are going to take Russian territory, so he has to expand to prevent that. Regardless of why the Kremlin is invading other countries, it is clear that whether or not the US does something to prevent it, the Kremlin is going to behave aggressively. Oddly, Biden/Sullivan seem to be prescribing to Mearsheimer's view of the situation, and it is absolutely a continuing of Obama's approach.
And while this is going on, numbskull Twitter "influencers" (and their idiot followers), egged on by Russian agents provocateur who can smell gullibility a mile away, bemoan how we're giving far too much aid to Ukraine. It's enough to make you werp