Putin is an enemy the West cannot topple—so why does Biden keep swinging?
President Biden’s foreign policy problems in the Middle East and Ukraine are daunting, especially in an election year, but the war between Russia and Ukraine could be nearing a military endgame, and not via negotiations. Vladimir Putin’s military is more entrenched inside Ukraine than ever, and the undermanned and under-equipped Ukraine military is facing a stalemate at best and the permanent loss of four oblasts. In essence, it is a defeat.
The Russian president’s unchallenged re-election over the weekend was a farce by democratic standards, especially coming after the death last month of the imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny. The 77 percent turnout was the largest since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Putin won 87 percent of the vote. “It was the same process” as in earlier Russian elections, a knowledgeable American official caustically told me. “The Russians voted that way because it was in their interest to do so. The people had to vote.”
Even amid a difficult and costly war that he initiated, Putin remains firmly in control of Russia, despite a series of Western sanctions and wishful thinking in Washington that its military expertise, weapons, and enthusiasm for the war would loosen his grip on power. Blindfolded by ideology, Biden wants the candy of regime change, but Putin has proven to be an iron-clad piñata.
The American president keeps taking his swings. It was not surprising that Biden chose to turn to Putin and the Ukraine war at the start of his State of the Union speech on March 7. He and his foreign policy staff have put Putin’s diminishment at the top of their to-do list since taking office. He told the Congress that Russia “is on the march” and Putin’s intent is “to sow chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. . . . History is watching . . . Europe is at risk.”
Yet he made it clear, without a hint of irony, that the immediate Russian threat to NATO and the unity of Western Europe were not enough to put American soldiers at risk in an election year.. “There are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine, and I am determined to keep it that way,” he said.
Or course, we journalists who have spent our lives in Washington quickly learn that political words have no meaning, and it’s what Biden did not say that’s important.
It is understood throughout the American intelligence community that Ukraine has little chance of winning the war. Its major counteroffensive of last year has failed, the army is depleted and short of ammunition, and military experts here have predicted that Putin will move to tighten his control over eastern Ukraine and the four border oblasts he has seized by moving to take Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, about twenty miles from the Russian border. Ukraine weathered Russian attacks on Kharkiv early in the war and finally took control of the city after successful 2022 counteroffensives. It has clung to shaky hold on it in the months since.
Kharkiv, founded in the 17th century, has special standing in Ukraine and Russia as the scene of four brutal back-and-forth battles against one of Germany’s last remaining intact tank divisions in World War II. Germany won the final battle in 1943, but it would be the last significant victory of its exhausted army in the war. The city is now seen as vulnerable to a renewed Russian attack.
In a post-election interview last Friday, Putin restated his conditions for peace talks with the Ukraine government headed by President Volodymyr Zelensky. “For us to hold negotiations now just because they [the Ukraine military] are running out of ammunition would be ridiculous,” he told a friendly Russian television journalist. “Nevertheless, we are open to a serious discussion and we are eager to solve all conflicts, especially this one, by peaceful means.
“Are we ready to negotiate? We sure are,” he said, “but we are definitely not ready for talks that are based on some kind of ‘wishful thinking’ which comes after the use of psychotropic drugs, but we are ready for talks based on the realities that have developed, as they are in such cases, on the ground.”
The American official, who is kept abreast of the ongoing talks between leaders of the two armies at war, said that officials of the Biden administration, working with Zelensky, continue to rebuff any chances of significant progress in peace talks. The reality, he said, is “that the lands in dispute”—four oblasts formerly in Ukraine’s control and Crimea—“from north to south and east to west all are Russia’s. So stop talking about it and make a deal.” Right now, “Putin could drive to Lviv”—near the border with Poland in western Ukraine—“but what would he gain in terms of his current dominance? US vacillation and peace at home? He wants Kharkiv, and he will get it when he forces Zalensky to capitulate.
“We were on the verge of a reasonable negotiation several months ago before Putin’s re-election and Zelensky’s military degradation. The US leaders got wind of the possibility and gave Zelensky the ultimatum—‘No negotiations or settlement or we won’t support your government with the $45 billion in non-military funds [that Ukraine is now receiving annually]. Biden has staked his presidency on meeting the Russian threat to NATO and outsmarting the monster, and he will not change course now, under any circumstances, and the end is inevitable. There is no road to victory for Ukraine, and it will end with Putin as an historical icon in Russia, having recovered a national jewel [Kharkiv] from the West.”
Adding to the chaos is the ineffectiveness of US sanctions in deterring Putin from his war plans. Last week the Economist summarized the extent of the failure. “Russia’s economy has been re-engineered. Oil exports bypass sanctions and are shipped to the global south. Western brands from BMW to H&M have been replaced with Chinese and local substitutes. . . . Dissent at home has been strangled.”
No friend of Russia, the magazine added a warning drawn from Great Britain’s experience of the Cold War: “Russia’s ability to hobble the global institutions established after 1945, not least the UN Security Council, should not be underestimated. It has morphed into a nihilist and unpredictable foe of the liberal world order, bent on disruption and sabotage. It is like North Korea or Iran on steroids, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads.”
This is the world the Biden administration fostered. Its refusal to seek a middle ground in the Ukraine war, along with its inability to check Israel’s continued assault in Gaza, will become a political liability in Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump, who warns of unending violence if he loses the presidential election in November.
The best that Biden has come up with is continued, if so far empty, talk about a ceasefire in Gaza, and a commitment that no American soldiers will be sent to the front in Ukraine. The president also promises that the United States will keep on paying for Ukrainians to fight and die in a proxy war that could be ended.
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