Secretary of State Antony Blinken favors “sticking with [the] program” of support for Ukraine, despite an upsurge in anxiety that Russia's instability could present new dangers to Western allies.
“The short answer is no,” Blinken said Wednesday when asked about changing U.S. policy in light of the Wagner Group’s aborted march on Moscow. “In terms of its support for Ukraine, exerting pressure on Russia, strengthening our own defensive alliance — we're sticking with that program.”
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Blinken’s pronouncement implies a rebuff of the Western misgivings expressed in the hours after Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin led a force toward Moscow with the stated goal of a showdown with Russian defense authorities. That short-lived uprising uncorked a flurry of discussion about whether U.S. and European allies should fear the prospect of a Russian defeat in the war in Ukraine.
“We are not in agreement on the outcomes of what will happen if Ukraine wins this war and what that will do to Russia,” an unnamed Western official told Financial Times, while a European Union diplomat was quoted as saying that “nobody wins from civil war in Russia.”
Those warnings gave voice to a thinly veiled disagreement that has characterized trans-Atlantic debates about the war in Ukraine. Most of the Central and Eastern European states freed by the collapse of the Soviet Union have argued that any acquiescence to Russian President Vladimir Putin would increase NATO’s vulnerability to attack from Russia, while larger Western allies have suggested that Putin might be more dangerous in defeat — and if not Putin, then perhaps someone who ousts him for his failures in Ukraine.
“It’s absolutely illogical,” another senior European official countered to the Washington Examiner. “It’s like obeying the nuclear [blackmail], and then the nuclear country can take anything that they want ... I don’t see there’s anything [that] is worse than Putin.”
The more quiescent impulses of some NATO leaders have been outweighed by the smaller allies in conjunction with the more muscular approach from the United States and the United Kingdom.
“It’s a situation that we’ve been monitoring for some time, in the instability that will be caused by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the first Western European leader to transfer NATO-designed main battle tanks to Ukraine. “Of course, we are prepared, as we always would be, for a range of scenarios.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has joined that chorus of endorsements for continuing Western aid to Ukraine.
“We should not make the mistakes that we are underestimating the Russians,” Stoltenberg said this week. “So, we need to continue to provide support to Ukraine, and that is exactly what NATO and NATO allies are doing with military support, but also support for the long term, and that is, in a way, what we can say today about the effects on the battlefield in Ukraine.”
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Still, Blinken signaled once again that the U.S. aspirations for the outcome of the fighting are more modest than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal to reclaim all Ukrainian territory from occupying Russian forces. Blinken, who characterized the counteroffensive as an attempt “to take back more of the land that was seized from it by Russia,” reiterated his belief in the eventual need for peace talks.
“We're also working in a sustainable way to help Ukraine build up its deterrent and defense capacity for the medium- and long-term so that Putin could not repeat this exercise in a year or two years or five years. ... The biggest impediment right now to finding peace, a just and durable peace ... is President Putin's conviction that he can outlast Ukraine and [that] he can outlast all of us. The more we are able to disabuse him of that notion, the more likely it is that [at] some point, he'll come to the table.”