‘They Need to Up Their Game’: Daylight between U.S. and Ukraine ahead of Anticipated Russian Attack

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

B y all accounts, Russia is prepared to mount a military assault on parts of Ukraine that it left alone during its seizures of Crimea and the Donbas. But there’s still conspicuous daylight between the U.S. and Ukraine as Washington works to help Kyiv shore up its defenses.

The situation could turn combustible come early 2022, according to reports on U.S. and Ukrainian military intelligence this past weekend and also to Roman Mashovets, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, who in a Sunday morning interview gave me the same timeline. Russia built up forces on the border this past spring as well, but what makes the present situation more dangerous is that, per Mashovets, military equipment is positioned and prepped for an attack, meaning that surging Russian forces to these positions could make an invasion possible within one or two weeks.

If all of that does pave the way for a Russian assault in January or February, the spillover from that conflict could well destabilize Europe, posing a massive international security threat and distracting U.S. officials as they grapple with the separate problems of Beijing’s ambitions across the Taiwan Strait and a resurgent international terrorist threat.

So, deterrence is the name of the game. But, as was evident from the discussions that took place last weekend at the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual defense conference, the U.S. and Ukraine are each saying that the other needs to do more — to get serious about the potential Russian assault.

Senator Jim Risch, the top Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a group of his Senate colleagues sat down with the Ukrainian delegation on Saturday. Speaking to me just before the meeting, he says the Ukrainians are making efforts: “They’re obviously doing the things one would do when they see this happening. I’d like to see a little more alacrity on their part.” He adds, “I think they need to up their game” to mobilize more rapidly, considering that Russia has successfully struck out against Ukraine before.

Ukrainians, in turn, have their own asks of Washington. In Halifax, however, they were careful not to make their requests too stridently.

President Biden’s move to waive sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 Russian pipeline project in April provoked an eruption from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who complained in an Axios interview that the U.S. just provided “bullets to this weapon.” And indeed it almost has: The pipeline was completed in September, but before it can become operational it must first go through a lengthy regulatory approval procedure. At a press conference on Saturday, by contrast, the typically plainspoken Oleksii Danilov, a senior national-security official in the Ukrainian government, only reiterated Kyiv’s boilerplate stance: that Nord Stream 2 is a “means of waging energetic war.” Kyiv says the pipeline is intended starve it of transit fees that it collects from current routes through Ukraine. U.S. allies in Eastern Europe also worry that it will increase European dependence on Russian gas just as the Kremlin plays geopolitical hostage games with those gas flows.

On this, Zelensky is in lockstep with a political opponent, former president Petro Poroshenko, whom he defeated in 2019. “I am pleased to see that Republicans in the U.S. Congress considered renewed sanctions against” Nord Stream 2, Poroshenko, who was at the forum this weekend, tells me through a spokesperson. “If the U.S. and its allies fail to make these moves, it would ‘increase the probability’ of Putin launching a second major incursion of Russia’s neighbor.”

So Danilov and his colleagues certainly understand that it’s crunch time for their push to get Washington to kill Nord Stream 2. Kyiv has very clearly toned down its public criticism of the Biden administration in recent months, while focusing on Congress. When Risch teamed up with some of his colleagues to propose an amendment to the annual defense-authorization bill that would force Biden to implement the sanctions he waived, Zelensky pleaded with the senators on Twitter to pass the measure, which had already been enacted by the House. Indeed, Danilov’s comments on the pipeline were muted on Saturday, but behind closed doors, at their meeting with the senators, he and his colleagues were vocal about the need to stop the pipeline.

There’s been an inexplicable holdup, however. By the time the bipartisan group touched down in Halifax, the amendment had been excluded from a package that was taken up by the Senate the day before. Risch suggested to me that it would eventually be adopted, and that its exclusion was due only to the disorganized way in which the National Defense Authorization Act has proceeded this year. Democrats in Congress prioritized Biden’s domestic agenda over NDAA and a China-focused legislative package, claiming, unconvincingly, that the spending bills are a signal to the world of America’s ability to compete with authoritarian powers.

Mashovets tells me there’s a separate but related issue about which Ukrainians are mystified, since “Biden exactly knows how to” force Putin to the negotiating table. Western leaders “can provide at least very strong sanctions against Putin personally and his circle and the companies who support his aggression. They are keeping all their treasure in a box, in dollars all over the world,” says Mashovets, suggesting that the issue came up during the meeting with the senators.

When asked why he thinks the U.S. and like-minded countries, such as the U.K., haven’t done that, he says: “I don’t know. It’s a secret for me.”

Kremlin opponents, most prominently dissident Alexei Navalny’s network, have called for measures like these, in early 2021 providing lists of sanctions targets to the Biden administration. Biden officials put in place a few additional sanctions designations targeting Russian officials in March, but they left quite a bit wanting and ignored the boldest-name targets that had been suggested. A bit over a month later, Moscow undertook a military buildup on its border with Ukraine, paving the way for the present situation.

Nord Stream 2 and the Putin sanctions are low-hanging fruit of the sort that Biden should have plucked months ago, well before Moscow tightened the vise around Ukraine and leveraged its hold over Belarus to further destabilize the situation in Eastern Europe through a migration crisis manufactured by the Russian and Belarusian dictatorships. Mashovets says there’s another, thornier way that the U.S. and its allies can prevent a Russian conventional attack: Push for Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

If the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom called for Kyiv’s ascension to NATO, they could get it through in a couple of months, says Mashovets, calling it a “political decision.” As he sees it, “Putin would be shocked, and he wouldn’t be able to do something against Ukraine, hybrid warfare, unconventional, conventional, asymmetrical, and other.” The move would head off any further Russian aggression.

Of course, a membership push is unlikely to happen, even though Mashovets and his government contend that Ukraine has met NATO standards, as evidenced by Ukraine’s star turn in conducting evacuation airlifts from Kabul’s international airport in August. Membership in the alliance is so complicated an issue that Mashovets says his team declined to bring it up with the Senate delegation in Halifax. Besides, the move is effectively Biden’s to make, and all signs point to a White House approach not of shocking Putin but placating him by taking steps to curtail certain missile tests and military exercises. A new round of lethal military assistance to Ukraine is under consideration, though, according to CNN.

Mashovets tells me he doesn’t want “United States soldiers KIA in my land,” because “we are doing that” in the ongoing conflict against Russian-backed forces in the Donbas. Instead, he says, “just provide us more effective tools and support us on the political stage. We’re fighting. It’s our job.” The longer it takes the administration to act swiftly to do that, the more the chance to deter an uninhibited Russian assault on Ukraine — with all of the consequences that would flow from it — fade.