As surging Trump plans to hand Ukraine to Putin, Biden must speed up aid in 2024

With Donald Trump riding high, President Joe Biden can no longer afford to dither over the future of Ukraine.

The GOP candidate, backed by his vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, has made clear he wants to cut off U.S. aid to Kyiv and effectively hand Ukraine over to Moscow. Indeed, should he win, Trump says he would start this process right after the November election before he even enters the White House.

Trump insists he can sit with Vladimir Putin and resolve the war in 24 hours. He wants to force Kyiv into “peace” talks that would only benefit the Kremlin. Down this road lies the destruction of Ukraine as an independent state.

Yet, a weakened Biden is still sticking to his policy of giving Kyiv just enough aid to hold Putin back from major advances — but not enough to convince the Russian dictator he cannot win.

Even if Biden pulls out a victory, his Ukraine policy is self-defeating.

As Biden’s prospects dim and Trump’s rise, the president needs to change gears now — and give Kyiv what it needs to push Putin back this year.

What makes Biden’s policy so frustrating is that he recognizes Ukraine is a test case for the new axis of dictators led by Beijing and Moscow.

If Russia can get away with invading a peaceful neighbor in Europe, seizing one-fifth of its territory and destroying its cities and civilian infrastructure, then all the post-World War II rules that kept the peace in Europe are trashed. The use of force will be back in fashion, globally, with China taking note when it comes to Taiwan.

Yet, Biden showed no signs he was rethinking his Ukraine policy at NATO’s 75th-anniversary summit, held the week before the GOP convention.

The administration appears to have been counting on Ukraine making enough military progress to force Putin into serious negotiations.

But Congress’ six-month delay in approving new weapons supplies for Kyiv, along with the strong prospect of a Trump victory, have clearly convinced Putin he is winning. Any peace talks, including Trump’s fantasy version, would merely give the Russians time to regroup for further attacks.

On the eve of NATO’s 75th-anniversary summit earlier this month in Washington, Russian missiles deliberately targeted the most advanced children’s medical facility in Ukraine. It’s hard to forget the scene of a pediatric surgeon — his white apron covered with blood — desperately trying to rescue any tiny bald patients trapped in the rubble after a Russian Kh-101 missile collapsed the chemotherapy ward at Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv.

By deliberately targeting children — as well as a nearby maternity hospital that specializes in problem pregnancies — Putin sent a chilling message to NATO: “I can do anything I want to Ukraine, and you won’t stop me.”

Still, the White House blocked NATO from setting out any clear path to Kyiv’s future membership, even though this is the only way to ensure Ukraine’s future security.

More immediately, Biden nixed any effective Kyiv response to the attack on children and babies by failing to lift the U.S. ban on letting Ukraine use U.S.-made long-range missiles to strike the aerodromes from which the attack was launched, deep inside Russian territories.

“The Russians are showing they aren’t worried about consequences,” I was told by Ukrainian parliamentarian Yehor Cherniev. “The absence of a strong reaction [to the bombing of the hospital] convinces them they are right.”

On Tuesday, in an interview with Voice of America, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder confirmed U.S. policy on deep strikes hasn’t changed. He said the administration wanted to avoid “unintended consequences and escalation.”

However, time after time Putin has failed to react when his blustery red lines have been breached, such as when Ukraine fired British long-range missiles at Russian air bases in occupied Crimea from which Moscow directed strikes at Ukrainian cities.

Given that Russia has opened a new front by sending thousands of glide bombs into Ukraine, striking heating and electrical systems, hospitals, schools, and markets, there is only one way to stop this aggression: by hitting its source.

During a news conference at the summit’s end, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg could barely contain his upset with the U.S. limitations. “There is no question that Ukraine has the right to hit legitimate targets on the territory of the aggressor,” he stressed.

Rejecting such criticism, the Biden administration touted NATO’s new package of air defenses for Ukraine: U.S.-made Patriot systems and F-16 warplanes.

But here again, U.S. and NATO policy is too little and far too late.

Kyiv, which lacks any viable air force, has been begging the West for Patriots to protect its cities since the war began more than two years ago. While Western allies have a reported 100 systems, the response had been painfully limited; Germany had delivered two, while the U.S. donated one.

This summer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Washington that seven new Patriot systems are the minimum he desperately needed to protect major cities. But at the summit, only five new air defense systems were offered, one each from Germany, Romania, Washington, and Italy, and a fifth that will be cobbled together from parts drawn from several countries.

Here’s the kicker: Israel has eight Patriot systems, on loan from the U.S., which it has put into mothballs because it considers them old technology, long replaced by Israeli defenses. Despite months of talks, the White House has failed to press Jerusalem to return some or all to Washington to be forwarded to Ukraine.

As for the F-16s, they are coming from the Netherlands and Denmark, and have been repeatedly delayed for months, in part because the necessary U.S. green light was slow to arrive.

Furthermore, the Pentagon continues to slow-walk training for competent, English-speaking Ukrainian pilots, with only about a dozen being prepared this year to fly a far larger number of aircraft. Yet, the White House has failed to prioritize training for Ukrainians or give permission for retired U.S. pilots to do the training abroad.

“If NATO is not ready to protect us, and to take us into the alliance, then we ask NATO to give us everything so we can protect ourselves,” Zelensky told me in a recent interview in Kyiv.

Hampered by White House timidity, that has not happened until now.

Trump and Vance have argued that Ukraine is Europe’s problem. The former president constantly claims the Europeans are freeloading off the United States.

But contrary to Trump’s claims, the European Union plus individual member nations are already giving Ukraine far more military and economic aid than Washington. More than $40 billion in annual military aid will now be funneled proportionately by member states through NATO to try to Trump-proof any U.S. military aid cutoff.

Indeed, Putin’s violent effort to destroy a peaceful neighbor has revived and unified the alliance — two-thirds of NATO countries now meet the 2% floor on defense spending, and, for the first time, there are some serious efforts to unify allies’ defense production and innovation.

As the Europeans now grasp (especially those on Russia’s border), Ukraine is the locale where Putin is testing how far he can go to undermine Western allies, including the United States. The Kremlin has been upping cyberwarfare, sabotage, and assassination attempts within many of their countries and inside their territorial waters.

In another nasty message from Putin, CNN reported recently that the U.S. and Germany broke up a Russian assassination plot to murder Armin Papperger, the head of Europe’s largest arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall, which sells critical 155 mm artillery shells to Kyiv, and will soon start producing them in Ukraine.

But the Europeans do not have the military heft or heavy defense production to help Ukraine defeat Putin without U.S. assistance if the White House refuses to face the urgency of the moment, or if Trump wins and cuts off aid.

Whatever happens to his candidacy, Biden can still rectify the NATO summit’s missed opportunity, and hedge against a Trump victory. But that will require the White House to recognize that its current policy plays into Putin’s hands.

As Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said in Washington: “The blindness is to think that Putin will stop and there will be negotiations. He will continue. He did not stop in 2014 [after Putin invaded Crimea]. We are in this for the long run. We have to create a clear deterrent … let’s allow Ukraine to attack them.”

To ignore Putin’s sadistic attacks at the children’s hospital, and across Ukraine, is to encourage Russian escalation. To let Kyiv respond with long-range strikes on Russian bases is to deter escalation by making clear Moscow will pay a strong penalty for its aggression.

If Biden acknowledges that truth — and lifts restrictions on long-range ATACMS missiles, while retrieving those Patriot missiles from Israel and prioritizing training for Ukraine’s pilots — the Democrats could display their foreign policy smarts in November, compared with Trump’s Putin-blindness.

By so doing, Biden can also help Ukraine make sizable advances before the November election, as a hedge against a GOP win.

But absent a White House sense of urgency, most of the many Ukrainian think tank and parliament members with whom I spoke at the summit left Washington deeply worried about the president’s limits and the possibility of a Putin triumph, aided by Trump.

They were determined to fight on, despite U.S. weakness, but extremely worried, and more than a little scared.

Editor’s Note: A version of this column was originally published July 14, 2024.