President Joe Biden and his administration are making a final push to help Ukraine before the Trump administration takes office in late January.
Biden has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine fending off Russian aggression since the war began in February 2022, although he has also been particularly cautious about the administration's actions to avoid escalating the conflict. There have been several cases in which the government rejected a request from Ukraine for several months, only to later change its mind and agree to the request.
President-elect Donald Trump has indicated he will push Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end the war, while Biden's slogan has been that they will support Russia “as long as it takes.”
However, with Trump taking office, Biden is making decisions to help Ukraine improve its positioning ahead of possible negotiations.
Earlier this week, the president finally agreed to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles provided by the United States to hit targets deep inside Russia. Ukraine has been calling for the ban to be lifted for several months, and in May the United States agreed to allow it to use the weapons to hit targets just across the border because Russia launched an attack from there on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv had other side of the border.
Ukraine advocates said the president should have lifted the restrictions so that Ukraine could attack military targets anywhere within Russian territory that were within reach much sooner. However, those who do not support continued US military support warn that it could lead to an escalation of the conflict.
The government first eased those restrictions in May to allow Ukraine to fire across the border into Russia when it launched an attack in the Kharkiv region from across the border. Until now, it was not permitted to attack military targets outside of this border area.
In this photo provided by the press service of Ukraine's 24th Mechanized Brigade, soldiers of the 24th Mechanized Brigade fire a 152mm Type 2S5 self-propelled howitzer at Russian positions in the, Monday, Nov. 18, 2024 Near Chasiv Yar, Donetsk region, Ukraine. (Oleg Petrasiuk /Ukrainian 24th Mechanized Brigade via AP)
George Barros, an expert on Russia and Ukraine at the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner that the decision was significant because “Russia's vulnerable underbelly is where it has its logistics and its supply lines and its command and control and has everything.” “Underlying type of wiring and fault lines” will now be possible targets.
Ukraine does not have the arsenal to hit every logistics hub, weapons depot or soldier behind enemy lines, but they “do not need the ability to attack everything one-on-one to achieve the same degrading effects,” Barros added and explained that Russia must now defend not only the front lines of the war in Ukraine, but also its supply lines deep into its own territory.
“It is a decision that is a dollar short and a day late,” Barros admitted. “It is a truism that in the truest sense of the word, for years, almost three years now, there has always been an operational need for Ukraine to strike into Russian territory.”
Ukraine has already started capitalizing on the relaxed restrictions with ATACMS.
The Pentagon also provided Ukraine for the first time this week with anti-personnel mines to be used against people instead of anti-tank missiles that the US has already provided. It was part of a new aid package for Ukraine announced Wednesday, bringing total U.S. aid to Ukraine since the war began to more than $60 billion.
“What we've seen recently is that the Russians have been so unsuccessful in the way they fight that they've changed their tactics a little bit and are no longer leading with their mechanized forces,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. “They lead with dismounted forces that are able to come in and do things that pave the way for mechanized forces.”
The Biden administration has sent dozens of aid packages worth billions of dollars to Ukraine but has been careful not to provoke Russian escalation while Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons.
Russia this week changed its nuclear doctrine to consider an act of attack against Russia or its allies by a non-nuclear state, but with the support of a nuclear state, as a joint attack against them – in a thinly veiled reference to the US
“It is another in a long list of weapon systems and platforms, from the M1 Abrams tanks to Bradley Fighting Vehicles to F16s, Javelins and ATACMS. The list goes on and on, and I think history will show very clearly that we were too late in providing these capabilities so that the Ukrainians achieve maximum impact and impact,” said Alex Plitsas, a national security expert at the Atlantic Council, told the Washington Examiner.
“I think if we take an honest look from a historical perspective, you know, and as we look into the future, there will be an assessment that the United States did the right thing in terms of supporting Ukraine, and it will “It may be that we took too long to provide critical capabilities and that definitely has an impact on the battlefield,” he added.
When the war began in February 2022, the prevailing belief among officials around the world was that Ukraine would fall into Russian hands within weeks. Instead, nearly three years have passed, Russia holds about 20% of Ukraine's territory, has lost about 600,000 soldiers killed and wounded, and is using North Korean troops to bolster its own ranks.
“I have no doubt that if you told Vladimir Putin that a military operation that he thought would last about two weeks would end up lasting more than three years, with hundreds of thousands of dead Russian soldiers and severe economic sanctions “thousands Destroyed tanks, destroyed the Black Sea Fleet, thousands of infantry fighting vehicles, hundreds of aircraft, I don't think he would have done that,” Luke Coffey, a national security expert at the Hudson Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “Or maybe he would have done it differently.”
The war celebrates its 1,000th anniversary this week. Day passed, a dramatic sign of a conflict that is unlikely to last into the summer of 2022.
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Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the defense intelligence chief, admitted last week that at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event, Ukrainians “displayed a will to fight that went far beyond anything any of us could have expected.” . Since then, the DIA has been trying to develop a methodology to determine the “will to fight” of a particular military.
The US underestimated Ukraine's willingness to fight just months after it overestimated Afghanistan's willingness to fight the Taliban on the way to withdrawal.
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