Last week, Biden reportedly told Democratic donors that Zelensky ‘didn’t want to hear’ his pre-invasion warnings.
Last week, Biden reportedly told Democratic donors that Zelensky ‘didn’t want to hear’ his pre-invasion warnings.
S enior Ukrainian officials believe that President Biden is ramping up an effort to fault Kyiv for failing to heed his pre-invasion warning about Russian war plans — and thus deflect from his administration’s own inability to deter the invasion, a former U.S. official who speaks regularly with top Ukrainian officials told National Review.
They’re furious about this new rhetorical tack, according to the source, because they believe that the White House declined to take meaningful action to deter the Russian assault in late 2021 and earlier this year.
The apparent U.S.-Ukrainian blame game comes against the backdrop of a grim military outlook in Ukraine’s Donbas region, particularly around the city of Sievierodonetsk. Although Russian forces have endured high casualty rates, Ukraine is sustaining significant losses — reported to be 100 to 200 troops killed every day. And the Russian invasion effort is making slow yet undeniable progress. The U.K.’s defense ministry said today that Russian forces “now control the majority of Sievierodonetsk,” though Moscow probably didn’t expect to face this much Ukrainian resistance.
During remarks at a Democratic fundraiser Friday in Los Angeles, Biden reportedly said that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky failed to listen to his warnings about the imminent Russian invasion. “Nothing like this has happened since World War II. I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating,” he said, according to an Associated Press report. “But I knew we had data to sustain” the prediction that Putin “was going to go in, off the border.” He added, “There was no doubt, and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it.”
The White House would no doubt contest the idea that Biden’s remarks were intended to shift the blame to Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials swiftly criticized the comments, disputing Biden’s framing of events and deriding his failure to impose sanctions on Russia ahead of Putin’s invasion. According to the Washington Post, Zelensky’s spokesman told Ukraine’s LIGA.net that “the phrase ‘didn’t want to hear’ probably needs clarification”; a Zelensky adviser, Mykhailo Polodyak, called Biden’s accusation “absurd.”
In an interview this week, the former U.S. government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that officials in Kyiv see Biden’s remarks as the “start of a process to lay blame on them.”
The source said that those Ukrainian officials acknowledge they declined to act on some of Biden’s most strenuous warnings about the imminence of Russia’s invasion. As late as January 2022, Ukraine’s defense minister told his country’s parliament that there was no reason to believe that Russia would immediately invade. The different assessments held by each side reportedly became a source of friction between Biden and Zelensky, resulting in a tense call between the two leaders in late January.
Nevertheless, there was some recognition among Ukrainians that Russia might soon attack. Amid the then-growing Russian-troop buildup, the Ukrainian ministers of defense and foreign affairs ditched an international security conference they had been slated to attend in Canada in late November. Notably, a Zelensky adviser who did attend that forum told NR that his government expected Russia to launch an invasion in January or February. Even then, the U.S. and Ukraine were not on the same page. A Republican senator, Jim Risch, said ahead of a meeting with a Ukrainian delegation, “I think they need to up their game” to deter the Russian threat.
But, the former U.S. official said, the reason Ukraine failed to act decisively on the Biden administration’s warnings was simple: They doubted their credibility, because the warnings were not paired with actions that conveyed a sense of emergency. Even as U.S. officials shared warnings throughout late 2021 and early 2022, the White House quashed efforts to sanction the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, lobbied Congress against other Russia-sanctions measures, and failed to increase arms transfers to Ukraine. These were all requests that the Ukrainians made ahead of the invasion, arguing that a tougher sanctions regime would build deterrence against Russia. The Biden administration did ship hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of defensive assistance to the Ukrainians ahead of the Russian attack, including Javelin anti-tank weapons, but the Ukrainians didn’t receive stinger anti-aircraft missiles until a week into the invasion.
Despite Kyiv’s quiet anger over Biden’s recent comments, the two countries are putting on a united front. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin met his Ukrainian counterpart today in Brussels for talks on the war effort. In a statement this afternoon, Biden announced a new $1 billion security-assistance package for Ukraine, which includes artillery, anti-ship weapons, and ammunition, including for advanced rocket systems.
“As you know, we began warning about Russia’s military buildup very early on before they attacked Ukraine and were very public about what we were seeing,” a White House spokesperson told NR. “President Biden greatly respects President Zelensky and the leadership he has demonstrated throughout this crisis,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that the U.S. “has already provided a historic amount of security assistance” to Ukraine and will continue to support the country.
Today’s security package no doubt landed well in Kyiv, but Ukrainian officials are requesting more multiple-launch rocket systems to win the war of attrition in the east. The source familiar with the Ukrainian government’s thinking said the worry is that the same cautious mentality that prevented a more effective pre-invasion policy still dominates in the White House.
This person also commented on how Kyiv will handle the view that the president expressed in Los Angeles: “They’re not going to accept being saddled with the blame for this.” In other words, the blame game has already begun.