Biden’s Options to Support Ukraine Are Shrinking

With only four months left in the Biden administration and little hope of Congress approving additional funding for Ukraine no matter who wins the presidency, the White House is debating how best to help Kyiv given its limited toolbox.

That includes potentially lifting some geographic restrictions on Ukraine’s use of certain Western weapons to strike back against Russian cross-border attacks—a possibility raised by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, this week.

Biden’s top aides are under no illusions that Ukraine can win the war by Jan. 20, when a new president will occupy the White House, and have tempered expectations for what they think Kyiv can achieve in the next four months. They aren’t pushing Ukraine to conduct peace talks or trying to dictate battlefield plans, U.S. officials said.

The goal, said one senior administration official, is to “improve Ukraine’s strategic position to the greatest extent possible between now and the end of the term.”

That became more challenging on Thursday, when Russia said it had launched a massive counterattack in the Kursk region, more than a month after Ukraine’s surprise invasion.

The war in Ukraine has come to define the Biden administration’s foreign-policy agenda since Russia invaded in February 2022. Biden touts his leadership in strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and bringing together Western countries to support Kyiv.

But he also faces criticism that Western support has consistently been too little, too late.

When Biden began his presidency four years ago, he pledged to end America’s forever wars that were sapping the country of lives and resources.

Now, time is running out on his presidency, and the Ukraine war is still going, with Russia advancing to a key logistics hub for Kyiv’s forces. If Vice President Kamala Harris captures the White House in the November elections, she would face some of the same constraints as Biden in trying to sustain support for Ukraine.

If former President Donald Trump wins, Ukraine would confront a new and potentially unknown dynamic in Washington. Trump during this week’s presidential debate declined to say whether Ukraine’s victory was in the U.S.’s interest but promised to end the 2½-year war immediately, if elected, by talking to the Russian and Ukrainian leaders. He offered no details, however, on how he would convince the two sides to negotiate.

For now, the conflict appears to be open-ended and risks escalation with nuclear-armed Russia. Moscow has shown little inclination to settle the conflict while Biden is president, as it bides its time to see the outcome of U.S. elections.

The Biden administration’s strategy “sounds an awful lot like a recipe for another endless war,” because it is “unable to send enough weapons to make a decisive difference on the battlefield, and they don’t have a clear sense of what the endgame should be,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has at times signaled an interest in negotiations, but he is demanding outright annexation of swaths of Ukraine now under the control of Kyiv.

“I have seen no sign, personally, that Russia is presently willing to engage in meaningful negotiations that would result in an outcome that is acceptable to Ukraine,” said the senior administration official.

At the urging of Ukrainian officials and NATO allies, the Biden administration in May relaxed its restrictions on some long-range weaponry provided by the U.S., allowing Ukraine to hit targets inside Russia in response to cross-border attacks.

Now, U.S. officials say they are considering further loosening those restrictions, this time to expand the geographic area from which Ukraine can launch some weapons into Russian territory beyond the Kharkiv and Sumy regions.

That is unlikely to satisfy Kyiv, which has been urging the Biden administration for months to allow its forces to use one particular long-range weapon—the U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, which can travel 190 miles—to strike targets deep inside Russia. The Pentagon has refused to budge on this point, both because it believes the impact would be limited and due to concerns over its own stockpiles, officials said.

U.S. officials worry that relaxed restrictions on weaponry could be a short-term palliative for much deeper challenges that Ukraine faces on the battlefield and in garnering support for what has become an expensive war of attrition.

Ukraine’s incursion of Russia’s Kursk region last month caused tensions with Washington. Kyiv’s forces have managed to capture roughly 500 square miles of territory inside Russia, the first time it has been invaded since World War II, but the area isn’t particularly strategic, U.S. officials say.

Publicly, the U.S. hasn’t commented on the Ukrainian operation.

“They see this as part of their strategy to defend themselves, to develop leverage,” said the senior administration official. “And we’re not going to, of course, get in the way of that.”

But behind the scenes, U.S. officials are nervous that by committing so many troops to Kursk, Ukraine has spread its forces too thin and left itself vulnerable in the east.

The Biden administration wants Kyiv to focus on halting the Russian advance in the east along current battle lines, U.S. officials say. Russia has made some recent advances toward the strategic logistics hub of Pokrovsk, but at an unsustainable cost of a thousand casualties a day across the front, said the senior administration official.

“What we’re going to keep doing is providing Ukraine with the equipment that they need to push back on the Russians and to stabilize the lines and to develop leverage and enhance their negotiating position,” the official said.

The administration succeeded in pushing through a $60 billion aid package to Ukraine earlier this year, enough to sustain Kyiv’s forces for the months ahead, but such levels of funding are unlikely to continue in the future, regardless of who occupies the White House.

To shield Ukraine against future uncertainties, the Biden administration and NATO allies have been trying to line up long-term plans for assistance to Kyiv that can survive political swings in any one country.

In his visit to Europe this week, Blinken noted that more than two dozen countries, many of them NATO members, have signed bilateral security agreements with Kyiv that will help it build up its armed forces and defense industry and “over time to make sure that Ukraine, for many years, has the capacity to defend itself.”

Blinken, who visited Kyiv with British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, huddled with Ukrainian leaders to prepare for more diplomatic confidence-building efforts expected at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to brief Biden on his “victory plan.”

The Biden administration has made some significant moves in the last few months to strengthen Ukraine’s position, such as diverting $2 billion worth of air defenses that were intended for other countries and securing a $50 billion sovereign loan for the country.