Devoted to “weaker” Russia, exiting Biden team finds “strength” in Ukraine

With just weeks left in office, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is making the rounds to tout his administration’s self-perceived success on the global stage.

“I think what we’re handing off is a very strong hand from the United States in terms of our national power,” Sullivan told CNN on Sunday. “…America’s competitors and adversaries are weaker and under greater pressure than they have been.” On the latter front, Sullivan is particularly enthused about the state of affairs in Moscow.

The Russians “are not doing great,” Sullivan bragged last week. “They set out on a strategic objective of taking the capital Kyiv, wiping Ukraine as we know it off the map…and they have failed in that. And they will fail in that.”

Anyone willing to read Kremlin statements since Feb. 2022 can easily recognize that Sullivan’s rendering of Russia’s “strategic objective” is fictional.

Russia’s stated objectives were forcing Ukraine into “denazification,” “demilitarization,” and permanent neutrality, so that it would never join NATO or any other military bloc. Russia pursued its objectives not by attempting to take Kyiv, but by sending just enough forces to compel Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky — who had long refused to implement the 2015 Minsk Accords — into negotiations.

Russia achieved immediate success. Talks between Moscow and Kyiv began within days of the invasion and culminated in a draft peace agreement brokered in Istanbul two months later.

During the Istanbul talks, Russia called on Ukraine to ban “the glorification and propaganda in any form of Nazism and neo-Nazism,” including the naming of Ukrainian streets and memorials after Nazi collaborators. On the latter request – a clear would-be fulfillment of Russia’s desired “denazification” — Ukraine did not consent.

Yet on the core issues pertaining to Russia’s security concerns, namely permanent neutrality for Ukraine and limiting the size of Ukraine’s military, the outlines of an agreement were reached. As multiple sources – Ukrainian, Russian, European, American, and Israeli — have all testified, this diplomatic breakthrough was quickly undermined by Kyiv’s US and UK sponsors.

The latest corroboration comes from Jean-Daniel Ruch, Switzerland’s ambassador to Turkey during the Istanbul talks. Echoing his earlier counterparts, Ruch now recalls that it was “the Americans with their British allies” who “pulled the plug on the negotiations” just as they were “on the edge” of finalization. To Ruch, the reason was clear: as Biden officials openly admitted, they wanted to “first weaken Russia.” For Ruch, the US-UK peace deal sabotage was “deeply immoral” because of the likelihood that “hundreds of thousands” of deaths would follow. And given that any future peace deal will “pretty much be based on what was negotiated in Istanbul,” that leaves Ruch with the obvious question: “Why did all these people die?”

In the eyes of Sullivan and his White House colleagues, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians had to die so that Washington bureaucrats could one day boast that they “weakened” Russia. As Sullivan’s delusional remarks newly illustrate, this remains the guiding objective. Accordingly, to meet its goal, the Biden administration is spending its final days in office lobbying Kyiv to lower the draft age from 25 to 18.

“Even with the money, even with the munitions, there have to be people on the front lines to deal with the Russian aggression,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained earlier this month. Accordingly, he added, “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary. Right now, 18- to 25-year olds are not in the fight.”

The Ukrainian government has so far resisted its chief sponsor’s advice. As an aide to Zelensky put it, Ukraine “will not compensate for the lack of weapons, aviation, or long-range capabilities with the youth of our men.”

Despite Blinken’s attempt to tout “the money” that Ukrainians are failing to reciprocate with younger cannon fodder, US funding for the proxy war is indeed running out. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the White House quietly asked Congress for an extra $24 billion in military aid for Ukraine. Coming on the heels of an election in which Donald Trump capitalized on war fatigue to win the presidency, not even Biden’s fellow Democrats bothered to consider it.

The Trump team has offered conflicting signals over its plans. According to a report in the Financial Times, Trump aides have informed European counterparts that the incoming president “intends to maintain US military supplies to Kyiv after his inauguration.” Yet in recent comments, Trump has suggested that he will reverse Biden’s decision to let Ukraine fire long-range US missiles into Russia, which, Trump claimed, he “vehemently” disagreed with.

For its part, the outgoing administration is counting on Trump to contain the dangers that its policies have encouraged. After Biden authorized the long-range strikes last month, the New York Times explained the rationale. Inside the White House, the Times reported, “officials believe” that “the escalation risk of allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with U.S.-supplied weaponry has diminished with the election of Mr. Trump.” The reason is straightforward: as the Biden team bows out with a closing salvo, they are simultaneously “calculating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia knows he has to wait only two months for the new administration.”

The White House is therefore acknowledging that their decision to let Ukraine launch long-range US missiles into the territory of a rival nuclear power was directly influenced not by battlefield conditions, but the outcome of a US presidential election. And moreover, they are gambling that the risk of escalation has “diminished” solely because they are soon leaving office.

Desperate to achieve their aims in Ukraine, some U.S. and European officials have “even suggested” that Biden “could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Times added. Such a move, the report vaguely noted, “would be complicated and have serious implications” – implications including nuclear war, given that Russia would never allow it.

Asked about that claim days later, Jake Sullivan offered a quick denial. “That is not under consideration,” Sullivan said. “…What we are doing is surging various conventional capacities to Ukraine so that they can effectively defend themselves and take the fight to the Russians, not nuclear capability.”

Yet as his own administration simultaneously admits, all the conventional US weaponry in the world cannot produce the Ukrainian soldiers needed to use it. This helps explain why, contrary to Sullivan’s hope that Ukraine will “take the fight to the Russians”, the Russians are advancing on multiple fronts.

Despite Sullivan’s exit-interview boasts, it appears that the outgoing Biden team is playing the weaker hand, while leaving the next White House – along with generations of Ukrainians – to bear the strategic failure.