For two years, Biden and Zelensky have focused on pushing Russia out of Ukraine. Now Washington is discussing a shift to a more defensive posture.
According to a Biden administration official and European officials working in Washington, the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of complete victory over Russia to improving its position in possible talks to end the war. Such talks would likely mean giving up part of Ukraine to Russia.
The White House and the Pentagon have publicly insisted that there has been no official change in administration policy and that they continue to support Ukraine’s goal of a full withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. But along with the Ukrainians themselves, U.S. and European officials are now discussing redeploying Kyiv’s forces from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s largely unsuccessful counteroffensive to a more robust defensive position against Russian forces in the east, an administration official and a European diplomat said, and a senior administration official confirmed. The effort also includes bolstering air defenses and building fortifications, barbed wire, anti-tank barriers and ditches along Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus, the officials said. The Biden administration is also focused on quickly reviving Ukraine’s own defense industry to supply much-needed weapons that the U.S. Congress has balked at replacing.
An administration official told POLITICO this week that much of this strategic shift toward defense is aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations. “That’s been our theory from the beginning — the only way to end this war is through negotiations,” said the 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 that happens.” The spokesman stressed, however, that no negotiations are planned yet, and that Ukrainian forces are still advancing and have continued to kill and wound thousands of Russian soldiers. “We want them to have a stronger position to hold their territory. That doesn’t mean we’re discouraging them from going on another offensive,” the Pentagon spokesman added.
For Biden, navigating a nearly two-year-old war in the midst of a tough election campaign, with former President Donald Trump and other Republican candidates openly mocking his efforts, will be a daunting task at best. By helping Ukraine move to a more defensive posture, the Biden administration must avoid appearing to favor Putin after insisting since the war began in February 2022 that it fully supports Zelensky’s pledge to defeat Moscow.
“These discussions [about peace talks] are starting, but [the administration] cannot publicly back down because of the political risk,” a congressional official familiar with the administration’s thinking told Biden, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In a December 21 interview, John Kirby, the National Security Council's director of strategic communications, said that as Washington "is nearing the end of our capacity" to provide military aid to the Ukrainians 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 the Ukrainians about the battlefield, about their needs and intentions,” Kirby said. But he added, “I’m 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 reiterated the administration’s position that “we are not dictating terms to President Zelensky.” Instead, he said, the White House was helping Zelensky “operationalize” his own peace proposal “with interlocutors around the world.”.
Over the past year, as U.S. military support on Capitol Hill has been rapidly declining and Zelensky’s once-vaunted counteroffensive has failed since it began in June, Biden has gone from promising that the U.S. would support Ukraine “as long as it takes” to saying that the U.S. would provide support “as long as we can,” and asserting that Ukraine has already won a “huge victory. Putin has lost.”.
Some analysts believe this is code: Prepare to declare partial victory and find a way to at least a truce or ceasefire with Moscow that would leave Ukraine partially divided.
“Biden’s winning comment has the quality of being true,” said George Beebe, a former head of the CIA’s Russia division who now heads the strategy department at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Government. But “time has become a significant disadvantage when it comes to Ukrainian labor and industrial potential, and that’s true even if the West continues its support. The longer this goes on, the more concessions we’re going to have to make to get the Russians to the negotiating table.”
Refocusing on defense could buy Ukraine the time it needs to eventually force Putin to make an acceptable compromise. “It’s very likely that a shift to a defensive posture will allow the Ukrainians to conserve resources and make future Russian advances unlikely,” said Anthony Pfaff, an intelligence expert at the U.S. Army War College who co-authored a study that predicted Putin’s invasion of Ukraine years before it happened.
A European diplomat based in Washington said the European Union is also raising the threat of accelerating Ukraine's NATO membership to "put the Ukrainians in the best negotiating position" with Moscow.
It’s a very sensitive 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 has continued to publicly insist that talks about NATO membership 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 signaling that he is willing to compromise if he is allowed to keep the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory he partially controls in the east of the country, The New York Times reported last week. Asked for comment, an administration spokesman said: “I am not aware of any arrangements to retain part of Ukraine: ‘I am not aware of any serious discussions at this time.’
This is not the only major 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 making a frantic series of diplomatic visits to Israel — the latest of which came last week — by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. K.K. Brown to prevent the Israelis from causing an even greater humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and escalating into a broader war against Hezbollah, which is becoming a real possibility and could engulf the entire region. Polls show that Biden’s previous pledge of unlimited support for Israeli retaliation 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 major 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 the U.S. economy will continue to be a major issue, and a new memo says Biden’s campaign will center on “protecting American democracy.” But with inflation rapidly receding — from more than 9.1% a year ago to near the Federal Reserve’s 2% target — and the economy heading for a highly unusual “soft landing,” the calculus of what could affect the 2024 vote could change, said Bruce Gentelson, a presidential scholar at Duke University. Biden still suffers from a low approval rating, which 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 become factors in that assessment.
As a result, the proliferation of crises abroad could put the president at risk in the voting booth, says Gentelson, a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore. “What often happens is that voters look at how you conduct foreign policy. They’re not interested in the issues themselves, 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 his characteristically brash style, the former president quoted Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (whom Trump called “very respected”), a Putin sympathizer, as saying that Trump “is the man who can save the Western world.”.
Two weeks ago, Trump praised Orbán at the University of New Hampshire, telling the crowd, “[Orbán] said that things would have been completely different, and that Russia … would not have invaded Ukraine. If Trump had been president, the Russians would not have been able to do that, it would not have happened. … And you know what else would not have happened? There would not have been an attack on Israel.”.
Asked to respond to this statement and other recent comments by Trump, including one in which he favorably quoted Putin, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison told POLITICO magazine: “Voters will be faced with a stark choice: There will be no attack on Israel: ‘In this election, voters will be faced with a stark choice between President Biden’s strong leadership on the world stage, including his work to unite our allies and defend democracy at home and abroad, and Donald Trump’s record of praising dictators and terrorists. Americans want a president they can trust, not an unstable extremist – and that is why they will reject Donald Trump again next November.’”.
Still, Biden faces political peril if the war ends badly for the Ukrainians. Even if Republicans in Congress bear the brunt of the military aid delay, it won’t do Biden much political good if Putin begins to regain his edge on the battlefield next year, after nearly $100 billion Biden has already poured into stopping Russia. For much of the conflict, Republican Party critics have accused Biden of not rushing to arm the Ukrainians with cutting-edge weapons, such as M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, long-range precision artillery, and F-16 fighter jets. Zelensky himself said in an interview in July that the delays “gave Russia time to mine all our land and build several lines of defense.” The ongoing crisis in Ukraine is also reviving Trump’s old criticism of NATO and the Europeans for not spending enough. According to a NATO report published earlier this year, the largest European economies have failed to meet their shared goal of spending 2 percent of economic output on defense.
Putin could be further aided in Europe by recent electoral victories by his far-right sympathizers, including Robert Fico in Slovakia and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who could join Orbán in blocking a proposed 50 billion euro ($54.9 billion) aid package.
Ukrainians themselves are engaged in a public debate about how long they can resist Putin. As Ukraine runs out of troops and weapons, Zelensky’s refusal to consider any new talks with Moscow looks increasingly politically untenable at home. The Ukrainian president, who is seeking to call up half a million more troops, faces growing domestic opposition from his commander-in-chief, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, and Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko.
A senior Biden administration official told POLITICO that all of these factors — congressional resistance and Ukraine’s domestic politics — are playing a role in the new discussions with Kyiv about redeploying to a defensive position. “The other big draw is how much of a factor the weather is going to be. When they decide how they’re going to position themselves over the next two to three months, it’s going to be physically harder to operate and go on the offensive.”.
One problem, of course, is that Putin understands the stakes all too well—especially given Trump’s soaring approval ratings, which suggest he will quickly make a deal with Russia on Ukraine and order the U.S. out of NATO or at least downgrade NATO. Militarily, the biggest concern is that Putin could go on the offensive in the spring with the heavy air support he has so far avoided but could deploy once Ukraine runs out of missile defenses. Politically, the concern is that Putin will not negotiate until he sees who the next U.S. president will be.
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 supplies from Western countries were cut off.
Ultimately, Kirby said, it is Putin who must make the first move — and the Russian president has so far done nothing of the sort. “While we would all like to see this war end immediately,” Kirby said, Putin “has shown no signs that he is willing to engage in negotiations in a spirit of goodwill.”.
