For two years, Biden and Zelenskyi have been focused on pushing Russia out of Ukraine.
Washington is now discussing a shift to a more defensive stance. According to a representative of the Biden administration and European officials working in Washington, the Biden administration and European officials are subtly shifting their emphasis from supporting Ukraine's goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in possible negotiations to end the war. Such negotiations will probably mean giving up part of Ukraine in favor of Russia.
The White House and the Pentagon have insisted publicly that there has been no official change in administration policy and that they continue to support Ukraine's goal of a complete withdrawal of Russian troops from the country.
But along with the Ukrainians themselves, American and European officials are now discussing the redeployment of Kyiv's forces from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi's largely unsuccessful counteroffensive to a stronger defensive position against Russian forces in the east, an administration official and a European diplomat said, as well as a senior administration official confirmed. The effort also includes strengthening air defense systems and building fortifications, barbed wire, anti-tank barriers and ditches along Ukraine's northern border with Belarus, these officials said. In addition, the Biden administration is focused on quickly reviving Ukraine's own defense industry to supply much-needed weapons that the US Congress is reluctant to replace. An administration official said in an interview with POLITICO magazine this week that much of this strategic shift toward defense is aimed at strengthening Ukraine's position in any future negotiations. "It's been our theory from the beginning that the only way to end this war is through negotiations," said a White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. "We want Ukraine to have the strongest hand when this happens." The spokesman stressed, however, that no talks are planned yet and that Ukrainian forces are still advancing and continue to kill and injure thousands of Russian soldiers. "We want them to have a stronger position to hold their territory. This does not mean that we are dissuading them from a new offensive," the Pentagon spokesman added.
For Biden, managing a nearly two-year war in the middle of a tough campaign, with former President Donald Trump and other Republican candidates openly mocking his efforts, will be a difficult task at best.
In helping Ukraine move to a more defensive posture, the Biden administration must not appear to be favoring Putin after insisting since the start of the war in February 2022 that it fully supports Zelensky's pledge to defeat Moscow. "These discussions [about peace talks] are starting, but [the administration] cannot back down publicly because of the political risk," a congressional official familiar with the administration's thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity told Biden.
In a Dec. 21 interview, John Kirby, head of the National Security Council's strategic communications division, said that with Washington "nearing the end of our ability" to provide military aid to Ukraine, as Republicans blocked Biden's request for about $60 billion more, the Biden administration is "very focused on helping them offensively and defensively."
"We have literally daily conversations with Ukrainians about the battlefield, about their needs and intentions," Kirby said. But he added: "I am not going to telegraph to the Russians what the Ukrainian strategy is for the coming months."
At his final press conference in early December, Zelensky said Ukraine was preparing new proposals to end the war, but added that he would not change his insistence that Russia withdraw all its troops. Kirby confirmed the administration's position that "we are not dictating terms to President Zelensky." Instead, he said, the White House is helping Zelensky "operationalize" his own peace proposal "with interlocutors around the world."
Over the past year, with U.S. military support on Capitol Hill rapidly dwindling and Zelenskyi's once-vaunted counteroffensive having fizzled since it began in June, Biden has gone from pledging that the U.S. would support Ukraine "as long as necessary" to saying the U.S. would provide support "as much as we can," and claimed that Ukraine had already won "a huge victory. Putin lost."
Some analysts believe this is code: Get ready to declare partial victory and find a way to at least a truce or cease-fire with Moscow that would leave Ukraine partially divided.
"Biden's winning comment has the potential to be true," said George Beebe, the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA who now heads the strategy division at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Government.
But “time has become a significant disadvantage when it comes to Ukrainian labor and industrial potential, and this is true even if the West continues its support. The longer this goes on, the more we will have to make concessions in order to force the Russians to sit down at the negotiating table." A refocus on defense could give Ukraine the time it needs to eventually force Putin to make an acceptable compromise. "It is very likely that a move to a defensive posture would allow the Ukrainians to conserve resources and make future Russian advances unlikely," said Anthony Pfaff, an intelligence expert at the US Army War College who co-authored a study that predicted Putin's invasion of Ukraine several years ago. , How did it happen.
A Washington-based European diplomat said the European Union is also raising the threat of accelerating Ukraine's NATO membership to "put Ukrainians in the best position to negotiate" with Moscow.
This is a very sore subject for Putin, who is believed to be most interested in a strategic deal with Washington that would keep Ukraine out of NATO.
The Biden administration continues to publicly assert that NATO membership negotiations are not underway. "President Biden has made it very clear that NATO is in Ukraine's future," Kirby said. Talks between the two militaries remain largely deadlocked, but Putin may now be making it clear he is willing to compromise if he is allowed to keep the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory he partially controls in the country's east, a newspaper reported last week. "New York Times".
When asked to comment on this message, the spokesman for the administration replied: "I do not know anything about any agreements regarding the maintenance of part of the territory of Ukraine: "I am not aware of any serious discussions at the moment." That's not the only big front on which Biden is trying to end the war -- and avoid bad headlines in an election year. In the Middle East, the administration is carrying out a frenzied series of diplomatic visits to Israel - the latest of which took place last week - by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General K.K. Brown to prevent the Israelis from causing an even greater humanitarian disaster in Gaza and escalating into a wider war against Hezbollah, which is becoming a real possibility and could engulf the entire region. Polls show that Biden's earlier pledge of unlimited support for retaliation against Israel is costing him support, especially among his progressive Democratic electorate.
"We don't want to see a second front" against Hezbollah, Kirby said.
Foreign policy is not expected to play a big role in the 2024 campaign -- especially since inflation rose in the first two years of Biden's presidency and economists last year predicted a recession. Polls show that the US economy will continue to be a top issue, and the new memorandum says that the central theme of Biden's campaign will be "protecting American democracy." But as inflation recedes quickly – from more than 9.1% a year ago to levels close to the Federal Reserve's 2% target – and the economy approaches a highly unusual “soft landing,” the calculation of what could affect on the ballot in 2024 could change, says Bruce Gentelson, a presidential researcher at Duke University. Biden still suffers from a low approval rating that Gallup called “the worst of any modern president running a tough campaign” — and his handling of foreign affairs in general and Israel and Ukraine in particular have recently been factors in that rating.
As a result, the proliferation of crises abroad could put the president at risk in the voting booth, says Jentelson, a former adviser to Vice President Albert Gore. "It often happens that voters look at how you conduct foreign policy. They are not interested in problems as such, but they want to see leadership."
Trump, the leading Republican contender, is already exploiting the perception that events abroad are spiraling out of control. In characteristic brash fashion, the former president quoted Hungary's increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (whom Trump called "highly respected"), a Putin sympathizer, who said Trump "is the man who can save the Western world."
Two weeks ago, Trump praised Orban at New Hampshire State University, telling the crowd: “[Orban] said that things would have been very different and that Russia … would not have invaded Ukraine. If Trump was president, the Russians would not have been able to do this, this would not have happened. ... And you know what else might happen? There would be no attack on Israel."
Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, who was asked to respond to this statement and other recent statements by Trump, including one in which he favorably quoted Putin, said in an interview with POLITICO magazine: plain fact: Israel will not be attacked: “In this election, voters will face a stark choice between President Biden's strong leadership on the world stage, including his work to unite our allies and protect democracy at home and abroad, and Donald Trump's record , which praises dictators and terrorists. Americans want a president they can trust, not an unstable extremist - and that's why they'll reject Donald Trump again next November."
Still, Biden faces political danger if the war ends badly for Ukrainians. Even if Republicans in Congress are largely responsible for delaying military aid, it won't help Biden much politically if Putin starts to regain the upper hand on the battlefield next year, after the nearly $100 billion Biden has already poured into stopping Russia. Throughout much of the conflict, GOP critics have accused Biden of taking his time in arming the Ukrainians with state-of-the-art weapons such as M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, long-range precision artillery and F-16 fighter jets. In an interview in July, Zelensky himself said that the delays "gave Russia time to mine all our lands and build several lines of defense." The ongoing crisis in Ukraine is also reviving Trump's old criticism of NATO and Europeans not spending enough. According to a NATO report published earlier this year, Europe's largest economies fell short of their common goal of spending 2 percent of economic output on defense.
Putin may be further helped in Europe by the recent election victories of his far-right sympathizers, including Robert Fico in Slovakia and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who may join Orbán in blocking a proposed 50 billion euro ($54.9 billion) bailout ).
Ukrainians themselves are participating in public debates about how long they will be able to resist Putin. With Ukraine running out of troops and weapons, Zelensky's refusal to consider any new negotiations with Moscow looks more and more politically unsustainable domestically. The Ukrainian president, who wants to call up half a million more troops, faces growing domestic opposition from his commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, and Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko.
A senior Biden administration official told POLITICO magazine that all of these factors -- resistance in Congress and Ukraine's domestic politics -- are playing an important role in new discussions with Kiev about a redeployment to a defensive position. “The other unpredictable card is how big a factor the weather will be. When they decide how they're going to position themselves over the next two or three months, it's going to be physically harder to move and go on offense."
One problem, of course, is that Putin understands the stakes all too well -- especially with Trump's skyrocketing approval rating suggesting he'll quickly strike a deal with Russia on Ukraine and order the U.S. out of NATO, or at least downgrade status of NATO. Militarily, the biggest concern may be that Putin may go on the offensive in the spring with heavy air support, which he has so far avoided but could deploy when Ukraine runs out of missile defenses. From a political perspective, the concern is that Putin will not negotiate until he sees who will be the next US president.
In late September, Sergei Shoigu, Russia's defense minister, said the Russians had an "action plan until 2025," and the following month, Putin said Ukraine had "a week to live" if arms shipments from Western countries stopped.
Ultimately, Kirby said, it is Putin who must make the first move – and the Russian president has so far done nothing of the kind. "While we would all like to see this war end immediately," Kirby said, Putin "has shown no signs that he is willing to enter into negotiations in a spirit of goodwill."
