Meanwhile, the Biden administration is still resisting efforts to crack down on a critical Russian pipeline project.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is still resisting efforts to crack down on a critical Russian pipeline project.
A senior State Department official said Tuesday that Russia should focus on “building back better” at home instead of menacing Ukraine, in a peculiar rhetorical bid to persuade Moscow to back down from its military threats.
“At a time when Covid is running rampant again across Russia as it is in other places, and where only half the population is vaccinated, the Kremlin has to justify to the Russian people why it is stoking a potentially very bloody conflict for Russia, rather than focusing on its own citizens’ health and on Russia’s own significant challenges in building back better,” said Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, using the name for the Biden administration’s own domestic-policy agenda that’s stalled in Congress.
Nuland is the same official tasked with convincing members of Congress to support the Biden administration’s sanctions waivers for Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Some lawmakers and analysts see that pipeline as an important pressure point that should be targeted as part of a stronger U.S. response to the crisis in Eastern Europe.
But while Nuland tangles with Congress on that front, she used the State Department daily press briefing to appeal to the Russian people, saying they should pay attention to their government’s military buildup of over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. That sort of mobilization is “extremely costly,” Nuland argued. “Were I a Russian citizen, I would want to see [that wealth] applied to the health-care system, to the education system, to the roads, the same kinds of conversations that we’re having here in the United States, rather than hemorrhaging money on a created crisis and putting their own military out there in the snow.”
She made the comments to the backdrop of an ongoing diplomatic frenzy: U.S. discussions with Russia, which kicked off yesterday in Geneva, will continue through the NATO-Russia Council and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe this week.
Although the White House on Monday released a fact sheet detailing what it says are nearly a hundred U.S. “engagements” with European allies, lawmakers, foreign-government officials, and Ukrainian civil-society experts say that the U.S. has declined to take critical steps to shore up Ukraine’s position ahead of a potential Russian attack.
One of the most public of these differences is over the Kremlin-backed pipeline, which runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. If the project were to become operational, Ukrainian officials say, it would make gas routes through Ukraine irrelevant, thereby removing one impediment to a Russian invasion. The Biden administration waived sanctions on German entities involved in the pipeline’s construction, prompting a sharp rebuke from Kyiv last spring.
While Kyiv has kept most of its disagreements with Washington to private discussions in the months since, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky over the weekend urged U.S. senators via Twitter to support a bill proposed by Senator Ted Cruz to swiftly impose sanctions on businesses involved in Nord Stream 2. A group of Ukrainian civil-society leaders issued a similar call on Tuesday afternoon in an open letter posted to the Atlantic Council’s website.
But last night, Nuland went to Capitol Hill to persuade Democratic members of Congress to oppose the legislation on the grounds that it would weaken transatlantic unity and alienate the German government. Although the new German chancellor supports the pipeline, the German government is split, with foreign minister Annalena Baerbock expressing misgivings about the project. Nevertheless, Senate Democrats are expected to support the administration’s position and block the bill.
Instead of going after Nord Stream 2, U.S. officials say that they are preparing a stringent sanctions package to impose punitive measures on Russia in the event of an attack on Ukraine. Those measures, the New York Times reported, might include sanctions that would prohibit Russian banks from accessing global financial markets and target the country’s technology sector.
The U.S. also recently quietly transferred $200 million in defensive equipment to the Ukrainians, amid complaints from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that the White House isn’t providing defense assistance rapidly enough. Nuland, during Tuesday’s press briefing, defended the administration’s approach. “We have this year alone supplied Ukraine with some $450 million worth of defensive lethal support in all kinds of categories that they need for their preparedness now,” she said, apparently referring to transfers that took place last year.
Meanwhile, although U.S. officials, including the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have regularly consulted their Ukrainian counterparts over the past several weeks, President Biden has conspicuously declined to nominate an ambassador to Ukraine.
As of now, U.S. deterrence of Russia’s threat against the country consists of hypothetical sanctions measures, an insistence on Russia’s obligation to follow the letter of international agreements, and the Biden administration’s contentions that the Kremlin would do well to listen to the demands of the Russian people.