On the menu today: President Biden isn’t talking about the war in Ukraine much lately, and it likely has something to do with the long-range outlook of the war darkening for the Ukrainians. Russia may not be on pace to conquer Ukraine, but it will slaughter as many Ukrainians as possible and reduce their cities to rubble. Meanwhile, here in the West, the same old pattern continues: The Ukrainians beg for tools to win the war — from fighter jets to long-range-missile systems to additional training by special-operations personnel — and the Biden administration’s response amounts to “Not yet, but maybe later.” The Ukrainians are bleeding now, but Biden and his team have plans for a lot of help to arrive in 2024 and 2025.
The Long-Term Outlook for Ukraine Darkens
Tuesday night’s State of the Union Address included only a fleeting mention of the ongoing war in Ukraine, and Present Biden discussed the conflict in the most generic terms possible: “Together, we did what America always does at our best. We led. We united NATO and built a global coalition. We stood against Putin’s aggression. We stood with the Ukrainian people.”
Earlier in the week, this newsletter noted that there may be multiple reasons why Biden is less eager to talk about the Russian invasion these days.
As the war approaches its one-year anniversary, there’s an increasing sense that Russia is, if not quite winning, then turning the bloody stalemate into the kind of fight it can win: a war of attrition. The Russian army might be using conscripts and convicts, but it’s just got a whole lot more guys to throw into the fight.
As of July 2022, Ukraine’s military consisted of up to 700,000 active-duty personnel, including the Armed Forces, Territorial Defense Forces, National Guard, and State Border Guards. In December, the Russian government announced plans to expand the size of its armed forces from 1 million to 1.5 million, but did not provide a timeline. Russia is also estimated to have as many as 50,000 private military contractors fighting in Ukraine as of early this year.
The New York Times sums up the current state of the fighting:
On the ground, Russia has been increasing the pace of its winter offensive, with forces supported by fighter jets attacking across the eastern front, according to Ukraine’s military. Military analysts have said that Russia has made small tactical gains over the past week — often at great cost — but as of Friday morning there was no evidence of a major breakthrough despite the heavy fighting.
Meanwhile, those long-argued-over and much-touted shipments of tanks to Ukraine are taking a long time to get where the Ukrainians need them, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So far, only Germany and Poland have approved substantial deliveries of tanks for Kyiv — around 200 and 74, respectively, including a mixture of new and older models. Canada has committed four modern German-made tanks to the cause.
The U.S. did pledge to supply 31 of its Abrams tanks, but U.S. officials now say it might take up to two years before they arrive on the battlefield. Britain has committed 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks and said they would be delivered by the end of next month, while France is set to send AMX-10 RC armored-fighting vehicles, which move on wheels rather than tracks but are often considered light tanks because of their heavy firepower.
Wait, it could take two years for those Abrams tanks to get to Ukraine? What, are they getting there by flying Southwest Airlines?
Keep in mind, Ukraine asked for the tanks in September. According to publicly available figures, from the beginning of September to the end of January, 1,123 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 3,368 have been injured.
When Biden announced the shipment of tanks, he did acknowledge that “delivering these tanks to the field is going to take time, time that we’ll see — we’ll use to make sure the Ukrainians are fully prepared to integrate the Abram tanks into their defenses.” But he also made it sound like the shipment would have a significant impact on the battlefield: “Secretary Austin has recommended this step because it will enhance the Ukraine’s capacity to defend its territory and achieve its strategic objectives. The Abrams tanks are the most capable tanks in the world. . . . These tanks are further evidence of our enduring and unflagging commitment to Ukraine and our confidence in the skill of the Ukrainian forces.”
We’re doing the same dance again on fighter jets and more advanced long-range-missile systems.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky visited the United Kingdom this week, and during his visit, U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that, “We have agreed that we will expand our training program — a program that has trained 10,000 troops in the last six months alone — to your marines and fighter-jet pilots, ensuring the armed forces of Ukraine are able to defend their country for generations to come.”
The training of Ukrainian fighter pilots is significant because the British don’t have Russian-made MiG fighters. This is Sunak and Zelensky effectively betting that at some point down the road, the U.K., the U.S., or some other NATO country will provide Ukraine with Western-made fighter jets, like the European-made Typhoons or the U.S.-made F-16 Fighting Falcons.
We’ve been through this back-and-forth about sending a particular weapons system so many times that when Biden said at the end of last month that the U.S. would not send F-16s to Ukraine, most Pentagon officials didn’t believe him and concluded the answer was really, “Not yet,” according to the Washington Post. Because of the experience with the delayed choice to send Abrams tanks, apparently the term “getting M1-ed” is a new Pentagon slang term for a decision that is reversed.
For months now, the Ukrainian government has been lobbying Washington for longer-range precision weapons. Apparently, the Biden administration sees a major moral and geopolitical difference between Ukraine using a U.S.-made weapon to kill a Russian soldier on Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine versus the country using a U.S.-made weapon to kill a Russian soldier on undisputed Russian territory. Launch a missile at Russian forces near Kozacha Lopan, a Russian-occupied and Ukrainian-liberated city on the Ukrainian side of the pre-war border, and it’s fine. Launch a missile a mile or two east at Russian forces near Zhuravlevka, on the Russian side, and you’ve done something provocative. (For what it’s worth, the Russians claim the Ukrainians have shelled Zhuravlevka.)
This morning, the Post reiterates that the Biden administration is still worried about “provoking” Russia and is withholding certain weapons systems from Ukraine because of those fears:
Kyiv possesses HIMARS launchers and a similar weapon, the M270 multiple-launch rocket system, each of which fire a U.S.-made rocket that can travel up to 50 miles.
Ukrainian officials also have sought the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a munition that can be fired from the same launcher and travel up to 185 miles. Biden administration officials have declined to provide that weapon, which is in limited supply and seen by senior U.S. officials as an escalation that could provoke Russia and drag the United States directly into the war.
Russia is wiping out villages, leveling apartment buildings, raping, pillaging, and committing all manner of war crimes. But remember, the U.S. sending a long-range weapons system to the Ukrainians would be an “escalation!”
Finally, the Post’s Wesley Morgan reports that the Pentagon wants to restore a pre-war program that had U.S. Special Operations troops helping train Ukrainian operatives “to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.” In December 2021, three months before the war began, the Pentagon wanted to expand the existing training programs, but President Biden said no, because he was “concerned that sending the troops would escalate the already tense situation with Russia.”
The Post reports that, “A determination [on restoring the training program] is unlikely before the fall. . . . If successful, these programs could resume as soon as 2024, though it remains unclear if the Biden administration would allow U.S. commandos back into Ukraine to oversee them or if the military would seek to do that from a neighboring country.”
“As soon as 2024!”
You see the recurring pattern here. Either as a deliberate choice or as a reflection of the president’s indecisiveness and divisions within his national-security team, the Biden policy appears to be to send the Ukrainian military what they say they need, several months to half a year after they say they need it. Ukrainians are fighting and dying now, and Russia is sending new waves of troops to the front, but don’t worry, Biden and his team will have that training program going by 2024, and those Abrams tanks should arrive by 2025.
If your goal is to help Ukraine win the war as quickly as possible, this is a stupid approach. If your goal is to help Ukraine win the war but you aren’t in a particular rush and want to minimize political pressure and controversy by only sending weapons systems once a broad consensus thinks they’re long overdue, this approach makes sense.
But then there’s the serious question of what’s going to be left of Ukraine when this war is over.
ADDENDUM: By the way, considering the indecisiveness of Biden laid out above . . . does he seem like the kind of guy who would authorize a probably illegal, unilateral, high-risk secret mission to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? The same guy who opposed the Osama bin Laden raid because it was too risky, who said Russia might not be held accountable for a “minor incursion,” and who spent his first year in office talking about how he wanted a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia? Biden, who refused to keep Bagram Air Base open over the request of his top advisers, suddenly turned into the steely nerved, gutsy David Palmer from 24?