Opinion: Biden should arm Ukraine to the teeth to prepare for the best negotiated peace
Before leaving office in January, President Biden can still do much to bolster Ukraine’s security, and our own. The need for greater U.S. aid is obvious from reports from the war zone.
Last month, Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine crossed the 1,000-day mark. And just as it has since the first day of its invasion, the Russian military this past week relentlessly bombed not only Ukrainian army positions along the 600-mile front, but also houses, clinics, schools, power plants and factories all across Ukraine. You’ve seen footage of the utter destruction in Gaza from bombing campaigns: Imagine that on a scale of Texas, and you’ll have a sense of Ukrainians’ daily life. The attacks keep coming. In just one night last week, Russia launched a barrage of 188 missiles and drones aimed at 17 regions of Ukraine.
The president-elect’s vow to stop the war may lead to concessions to Putin, including divisions of territory, which have a bloody history.
The Kremlin also keeps waging disinformation. It has grossly misrepresented that overnight blitz as a “response” to new Western aid and made overblown claims about Russia’s experimental ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, that hit Ukraine’s major industrial city of Dnipro a few days earlier.
And Ukraine is reporting a spike in the number of prisoners of war being murdered by Russians — dozens of cases alleged in recent months, including 16 said to have been shot immediately after they surrendered.
If the incoming administration abandons Kyiv, Russia’s ambitions will explode and nuclear weapons will proliferate.
Despite being often outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainian forces, with support from the U.S. and Europe, repelled most of the infantry assaults this past week — 150 to 220 skirmishes each day. While ceding some territory here and there, they inflicted punishing losses on Russia.
The Ukrainian people are unbowed. Defying destruction and trauma, they continue to cherish and defend what Russia threatens to take away: About 85% of 418 respondents in my tracking poll in October with Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology said democracy and free speech are important to them. More than 80% said Ukraine will win the war. Around 90% said they will not compromise on Ukraine’s independence.
The decision is a major U.S. policy shift and comes as President-elect Donald Trump has said that he would bring about a swift end to the war.
But change and uncertainty are in the air. In November, Russia gained territory in Ukraine faster than at any time since the early months of its full-scale invasion. Ukraine failed to get enough support from its allies to counter Russia’s devastating guided glide bombs.
In contrast, Russia got unprecedented assistance from North Korea, with an estimated 5 million artillery shells, 100 ballistic missiles and 11,000 troops sent into battle to counter Ukraine’s diversionary advance into Russia’s Kursk province. And the Kremlin is reaching out for more elsewhere, including to Houthis in Yemen and to the Taliban, with Moscow now set to remove that group from its list of terrorists. Russia’s economy is on a war footing and has grown more than twice as fast as the euro area over the last year despite Western sanctions.
In other words, Ukraine needs much more help to protect its sovereignty and hold the line against Russian expansionism.
Biden’s recent authorization for U.S.-supplied missiles to be used against targets in Russia has already enabled Ukraine to seriously damage an air base, an army base, a command hub, a powerful anti-aircraft complex, and a major refinery and fuel depot that were sustaining Russia’s offensive. The first approved deliveries of U.S. antipersonnel land mines will help the beleaguered Ukrainian forces retain control of vital strongholds.
The next priority for the U.S. in the remainder of Biden’s term is to get the biggest bang possible out of the $6 billion that’s congressionally authorized to support Ukraine.
If the U.S. would supply Ukraine with about half of the 500 newly manufactured missiles in the American arsenal, Kyiv could deliver deadly blows to most of 200 military facilities within range that directly uphold the Russian offensive. (So far, the U.S. has given Ukraine just 50 of these long-range missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems.)
With three additional air defense systems, known as Patriot batteries, Ukraine can close vulnerabilities in its air defenses and even resume effectively targeting Russia’s glide-bomb-carrying aircraft.
If the U.S. would supply Ukraine with just one of the Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense batteries that we keep in reserve for contingency operations — the same technology being sent to Israel to counter Iranian missiles — Kyiv could take the sting out of Moscow’s longer-range ballistic missile threats.
Such strong actions taken in the next two months would also help the incoming Trump administration safeguard America’s strategic interests for years to come. Already, the president-elect has appointed Keith Kellogg, a retired Army general, to bring the Russia-Ukraine war to an end.
Kellogg’s plan is to use threats and inducements to get both sides to agree to a cease-fire along the current front lines. A hardened soldier and clear-eyed realist with a lifetime experience of great-power conflicts, the general is likely to learn quickly that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not settle for controlling one-fifth of Ukraine; the Kremlin wants to get Ukraine and the West to capitulate. That would make Donald Trump look weak. After a new administration has been so publicly defeated, any deal with any nation on any issue will become much costlier and harder to achieve in the remainder of Trump’s four years.
To avoid this fiasco, Trump and his team will have to work out bolder and more effective ways to support Ukraine until Moscow has no choice but to accept a negotiated settlement with Ukraine’s security guarantees. Even if Trump’s priority is to end the war quickly, it would be dangerous to do that by pressuring Ukraine through diminished aid; the only hope for a lasting peace that preserves U.S. standing would come through pressuring Russia.
Biden has a key role to play at this crucial juncture. The more boldly he can back Kyiv while still in office, the greater Ukraine’s chances of surviving as a free nation and the greater America’s chances of remaining the reigning superpower.
Mikhail Alexseev, a professor of international relations at San Diego State University, is the author of “Without Warning: Threat Assessment, Intelligence, and Global Struggle” and principal investigator of the War, Democracy and Society project funded by the National Science Foundation.
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