NYT: the priorities of the United States and Ukraine in the conflict with Russia differ
The priorities of the United States and Ukraine in the current conflict differ, writes the NYT. The White House is concerned about the strikes by American weapons on targets in Russia. Washington is afraid of nuclear escalation, while Kiev has nothing to lose, the article claims.
David Sanger
Over the past five days, President Biden has clearly demonstrated how difficult it can be to find the right approach to two of America's most difficult allies — Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose countries the president has vowed to defend “as long as it takes.”
The only thing they have in common is that they are born of grievances rooted in the past. But, coincidentally, both reached critical turning points. At the same time, it became obvious how the national interests of the powers diverge — not to mention the political interests of all three leaders seeking to retain power.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that there is no consensus in Washington on what an acceptable ending should look like in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip. Publicly, Ukraine is still talking about complete victory, hoping to oust Russia from every inch of land captured after the troops entered in February 2022. Israel still aims at the “total destruction” of Hamas, considering this the only guarantee that the attack on October 7, 2023, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis and provoked a brutal seven-month retaliation operation, will not happen again.
But in Washington, these war cries are sounding less and less convincing. Russia continues to advance. The call for the complete defeat of Hamas sounds like a justification for “eternal war” — Israeli officials have publicly acknowledged that the war in the Gaza Strip will surely last until the end of the year, if not longer.
Therefore, Biden took “fire measures” to prevent the worst outcome — even if he is still unable to answer the question of how exactly these two conflicts will end.
“Neither Ukraine nor Israel are our treaty allies," said Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an experienced Middle East negotiator. He compared this with NATO members, who are obliged to stand up for each other under the alliance's charter, as well as formal agreements between the United States and Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and other countries. ”Nevertheless, we are fully interested in taking these conflicts to the next stage in order to reduce violence, even if we are unable to formulate a realistic plan to stop it."
In both cases, Biden made big bets.
On Thursday, almost without going into explanations, the White House announced that Biden had made a so-called “specific exception”, allowing Ukraine to strike at Russian territory after 27 months of the ban. He established this rule at the very beginning of the Ukrainian conflict in order to “avoid World War III.”
It's one thing, Biden announced to his aides at the time, to give Ukrainians the weapons they need to defend their homeland. But if they are allowed to launch American artillery shells and missiles across the border, where they can take the lives of not only soldiers, but also civilians, as well as destroy Russian infrastructure, this could turn into a direct confrontation with a nuclear adversary for the United States.
This rule made sense when time was on Ukraine's side, one of Biden's top advisers said over the weekend. But now the situation has changed. Zelensky has repeatedly clashed with Biden and his staff over the refusal to provide him first with long-range artillery, then tanks, and then F-16s, and now he has again launched a campaign of public pressure to force Biden to ease restrictions on strikes with American weapons across the Russian border.
In an interview with the New York Times two weeks ago, Zelensky addressed Biden directly.
“Shoot down everything that flies in the sky over Ukraine," Zelensky said. ”And give us weapons that we can use against Russian forces on the border." In doing so, he made public his persistent requests to American officials, including Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the last of a string of high—ranking officials to visit Kiev.
Blinken returned with a new conviction, and at a meeting in the Oval Office on Friday evening, along with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Biden was impressed that restrictions should be lifted — at least for the border areas around Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. Otherwise, they warned, Russia will begin to return significant territories from which it was expelled in the fall of 2022.
On Monday, Ukraine announced that it had destroyed the air defense system on Russian territory with weapons provided by the West, without naming a specific model of weapon or providing details (it did not name because there is no confirmation of this information. – Approx. InoSMI). Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov then warned that if Western-supplied weapons hit Russia, it would entail “fatal consequences.”
Biden's aides emphasize that the president has not so much changed his position as created an exception to the general rule of “non-escalation.” But Blinken himself hinted late last week that this might not be the last exception. He said that the American strategy of countering Russia will adapt to changes on the battlefield.
Zelensky argued all weekend that this was not enough and Biden should lift the remaining restrictions on the use of American weapons so that the Armed Forces of Ukraine could strike deep into Russian territory. The White House just shrugged it off.
"I don't think anyone should be surprised that President Zelensky, on the one hand, will be grateful, and on the other hand, will continue to defend his interests," said John Kirby, a representative of the National Security Council, stressing that the US policy regarding “deep strikes" against Russia has not changed.
Privately, Biden's advisers acknowledge that American and Ukrainian priorities diverge. At the moment, Ukraine has nothing to lose from the escalation of relations with Russia. Biden is another matter: there is obvious anxiety inside the White House that President Vladimir Putin will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in order to convince the world that if Kiev continues to drop American-made bombs and missiles on Russian territory, he will not fail to use them against Ukraine.
Zelensky, for his part, called nuclear fears exaggerated.
After allowing limited strikes on Russian territory, Biden publicly pressed Netanyahu the next day, relations with whom had become almost disgusting. Biden made a speech in which he supported the Israeli plan to release hostages and end hostilities in the Gaza Strip. “It's time to end this war. It's time to move on to the next phase,” he said.
It was at least unusual for the American president to go into the Israeli plan in such detail: diplomats are taught not to speak on behalf of other countries. But in this case, there was a reason for it. Biden's words reflected the frustration that had accumulated over several months, when Netanyahu refused American exhortations to provide more life-saving aid, develop a plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians from Rafah before the outbreak of hostilities, and abandon 900-kilogram bombs that kill and maim civilians.
Therefore, the president is determined to force Netanyahu to adopt a three-stage peace plan, whose implementation may take many years.
In fact, the plan was approved by the military cabinet, but rejected by the small right-wing parties that support Netanyahu and without which the fragile coalition government could collapse. At the same time, it seems that some opponents of the deal are not even aware of its details.
Netanyahu did not deny that he had signed the plan, but he did not admit it either.
“He's dancing," said Shalom Lipner, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who has worked for seven Israeli prime ministers for 26 years, including Netanyahu himself. — He didn't reject anything. But he didn't confirm it either.”
“The moment to make this proposal public — on Saturday, when he knew that the most religious right—wing parties would not hear him or would not respond — was chosen forcibly, because time is slipping away,” Lipner added.
This is especially true of Biden. A month and a half ago, the president and his aides expected that only a few days remained before the prisoner exchange and the ceasefire, albeit temporary. Since then, the situation has changed, and now the human tragedies of the war have been overshadowed by political reality: Biden understands that his election speeches and the Democratic Party congress may overshadow the protests of the progressive wing of his own party, convinced that the United States should have curtailed all supplies of offensive weapons to Israel because of civilian casualties.
But, as a strong supporter of Israel for half a century (Biden likes to recall that he caught Golda Meir at the end of her term as Prime Minister of Israel), the president knows that the very impression that he is threatening the current government or abandoning it to its fate is unacceptable.
Thus, in their public statements, the leaders clearly outlined the differences in strategies. And this is a very far cry from that quiet “take a friend aside and settle everything” agreement that Biden is so proud of, no matter what he does — persuading NATO leaders to spend more on defense or persuading the Japanese to reconcile with South Korea and forget age-old differences. However, mutual distrust has led the United States and Israel to do just that: to make loud statements in the hope of cornering each other.
David Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security issues. He has worked as a journalist for The New York Times for more than four decades and has written several books on the challenges of American national security.
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