Visiting Ukraine on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the United States stands resolute alongside Kyiv. Blinken also announced another $200 million provision of defensive support.
The truth, however, is that even as Russia’s invasion plan takes shape, the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine is far more rhetorical than real. Judged by what it could do and is doing to support Ukraine’s defensive means, the U.S. is falling well short of what needs to be done.
Even before this crisis began, President Joe Biden stabbed Ukraine in the back when he waived sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Rejecting President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pleading to the contrary, a plurality of Democrats last week rejected a Republican bill to reimpose sanctions on the pipeline. This fits with Biden’s broader pattern of indirect collusion with Russian interests.
Biden encouraged Russian aggression by pressuring the U.S. military forces in Europe to reduce their air operations near Russia. Biden has also slow-walked the supply of antitank and other weapons to Ukraine, ignoring Republican legislative efforts to do more. He has also failed to match allied efforts to challenge Russian military imperialism in the Black Sea. But that’s just the tip of Biden’s weakness iceberg.
As Politico reported on Wednesday, the Biden administration is preventing NATO’s Baltic member states from supplying Ukraine with antitank and anti-air weapons. Instead, to the increasing chagrin of Congress, including even Democrats, the administration said only that it is “considering” new steps to support Ukraine.
It’s clear what’s going on. Given the administration’s persistent failure to provide Russia with a resolute response to its demands, it keeps up this “considering” rhetoric as a form of spin, designed to offer a thin pretense that the U.S. is leading against Russia. But no one outside of Biden’s White House sycophants believes it. Certainly Russia does not believe it, nor does Ukraine, nor do U.S. allies in Europe, except maybe Germany. But the way things are going there, Germany might as well join the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization anyway.
Embarrassed by this failure of U.S. leadership, other allies are stepping into the breach. In this regard, the picture below (my annotated screenshot, with Kyiv circled red, from the ADS-B Exchange website) is worth a thousand words.
That British Royal Air Force flight on Wednesday represents one of many that have been traveling between the United Kingdom and Ukraine in recent days. Those flights are delivering thousands of next-generation light antitank weapons, or NLAW, specifically designed to be easy to carry and use and effective against various unarmored and armored targets.
In the event of a Russian invasion, the NLAWs will allow Ukrainian forces to operate in small, maneuverable kill teams against Russian mechanized forces. They are perfectly suited to boosting Ukraine’s means of defending its territory against Russian offensive forces. But as in the picture above, note that the British aircraft are avoiding German airspace, the shortest route between Britain and Ukraine. The U.K. has not requested overflight permission, but only so that Germany doesn’t have to make a decision between allowing an ally to support a democracy or denying that request in favor of appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Biden seems to like Germany’s appeasement example.
While a small number of U.S. Army Special Forces personnel are in Ukraine, they are training Ukrainian forces away from the front lines. In contrast, Canadian special forces are now deployed on less-cautious missions in Ukraine. I have not been able to confirm it, but I believe that British special forces, likely from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, are also providing forward reconnaissance support to Ukrainian forces. Australia is set to support these efforts in the coming days. Australia remains infuriated by Russia’s July 2014 killing of 27 of its citizens in the June 2014 downing of the MH17 passenger airliner. (Incidentally, former President Barack Obama and Ben Rhodes appeased Russia following that incident.)
Put another way, it’s not surprising that so many U.S. allies are worried. Biden, who entered office promising to “be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security,” is proving to be a human counterpart to the Putin pipeline he saved — full of hot air.
