President Joe Biden and his administration are making a final push to help Ukraine before the Trump administration is inaugurated in late January.
Biden has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine as it has fended off Russian aggression since the war began in February 2022, though he also has been particularly cautious in what the administration provides to them to avoid escalating the conflict. There have been several instances where the administration would decline a request from Ukraine for several months only to later change its mind and agree to it.
President-elect Donald Trump has indicated he will push both Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end the war, whereas Biden’s motto has been they will support the former “as long as it takes.”
With Trump coming in, however, Biden is making decisions to help Ukraine improve its positioning ahead of the possible negotiations.
Earlier this week, the president finally agreed to allow Ukraine to use U.S.-provided long-range missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. Ukraine has been asking for the ban to be lifted for several months, and back in May, the U.S. agreed to allow them to use the weapons to hit targets right over the border because Russia had launched an attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv from the other side of the border.
Ukraine backers have said the president should have lifted the restrictions, allowing Ukraine to hit military targets anywhere in Russian territory that’s within their reach much sooner, while those who do not support continued U.S. military support warn that it could lead to an escalation in the conflict.
The administration first loosened these restrictions in May to allow Ukraine to fire over the border into Russia when they launched an attack in the Kharkiv region from the other side of the border. They were not, until now, allowed to strike military targets beyond that near-border area.
George Barros, an expert on Russia and Ukraine with the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner that the decision is meaningful because “Russia’s vulnerable underbelly, where they have their logistics and their supply lines and their command and control and all the underlying sort of wiring and fault lines,” will now be potential targets.
Ukraine doesn’t have the arsenal to hit every logistics hub, weapons depot, or soldier behind enemy lines, but they “don’t need to have a one-to-one ability to strike everything in order to achieve the same degrading effects,” Barros added, explaining that Russia will now have to defend not only the front lines of the war in Ukraine but also their supply lines deep into their own territory.
“It’s a decision that’s $1 short and a day late,” Barros acknowledged. “It’s a truism that quite literally for years, almost three years at this point, there’s always been a Ukrainian operational requirement to have to strike into Russian territory.”
Ukraine has already begun capitalizing on the loosened restrictions with ATACMS.
The Pentagon also gave Ukraine anti-personnel landmines for the first time this week, which are meant to be used against humans instead of anti-tank missiles, which the U.S. has already provided. It was part of a new aid package to Ukraine announced on Wednesday, bringing the total of U.S. aid to Ukraine since the war began to more than $60 billion.
“What we’ve seen most recently is because the Russians have been so unsuccessful in the way that they have been fighting, they’ve kind of changed their tactics a bit and they don’t lead with their mechanized forces anymore,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said. “They lead with dismounted forces who are able to close in and do things to kind of pave the way for mechanized forces.”
The Biden administration has provided Ukraine with dozens of aid packages worth billions of dollars, but they have been cautious not to provoke a Russian escalation, while Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly overly threatened to use nuclear weapons.
Russia altered its nuclear doctrine this week so that they will view an act of aggression against Russia or its allies from a non-nuclear state, but with the support of a nuclear country, a joint attack against themselves — which is a thinly veiled reference to the United States.
“It’s another in a laundry list of weapons systems and platforms from the M1 Abrams tanks to Bradley Fighting Vehicles, to F16s, to Javelins, and ATACMS, the list goes on and on where I think history will be very clear that we were too late delivering these capabilities for the Ukrainians to have maximum effect and impact,” Alex Plitsas, a national security expert with the Atlantic Council told the Washington Examiner.
“I think if we’re taking an honest look from a historical perspective, you know, looking backwards in the future, there will be an assessment that the United States did the right thing in terms of providing support to Ukraine, and that the criticism will be that we took too long to provide critical capabilities, and that definitely impacts the battlefield,” he added.
When the war began in February 2022, the prevailing belief from officials across the globe was that Ukraine would fall into Russian hands within a matter of weeks. Instead, it’s been nearly three years, Russia is holding about 20% of Ukrainian territory, has lost about 600,000 troops killed and wounded, and is currently using North Korean troops to bolster their own ranks.
“I have no doubt in my mind if you tell Vladimir Putin that a military operation, which he thought was going to take about two weeks would end up lasting more than three years with hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dead, severe economic sanctions, thousands of tanks destroyed, the Black Sea fleet destroyed, thousands of infantry fighting vehicles, hundreds of planes, I don’t think he would have done it,” Luke Coffey, an national security expert with the Hudson Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “Or he would have done it differently, maybe.”
The war passed its 1,000th day this week, a dramatic marker for a conflict that wasn’t expected to last into summer 2022.
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Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, acknowledged last week that the Ukrainian “exhibited a will to fight that was far beyond anything any of us had estimated” during an event put on by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. The DIA has since begun trying to create a methodology to determine the “will to fight” of a certain military.
The U.S. underestimated Ukraine’s will to fight only months after it overestimated Afghanistan’s will to fight against the Taliban on its way out.