Biden’s triumphant visit to Kyiv gives way to a sober war reality

Last week, President Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv as an act of defiance meant to mark the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. This week, back in Washington, grimmer realities are setting in.

Biden will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House on Friday in what will be, on the surface, another display of Western unity with Ukraine as it repels Russia’s punishing invasion. But the show of solidarity comes against a backdrop of growing strain as the trans-Atlantic alliance works to remain in lockstep while grappling with the fact that the war has no end in sight.

A renewed and brutal Russian offensive is making incremental progress along the front, and Moscow may be poised to receive assistance from China. As Ukraine prepares for its own spring counteroffensive, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pleas for help have grown more desperate, raising the stakes for Biden to keep the weapon supply flowing, while also managing ties to both Kyiv and the capitals of a suddenly, violently reshaped Europe.

“It may well be that 2023 is the best chance Ukraine has,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Biden can say the U.S. will support Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’ if he can keep getting Congress to approve funds, and the idea with that rhetoric is to send a clear message to Moscow. But there’s also a U.S. election in 2024, and a German election in 2025, which will make things far more complicated.”

Scholz’s meeting with Biden — scheduled to be just one hour — will largely highlight both the transformation of Europe and the challenges for the U.S. president to hold it together to resist Russia. Two days after Russia’s invasion, Scholz vowed in his “Zeitenwende” speech that Germany, long wary of militarization in the postwar WWII era, would take steps to boost defense spending. It was an immediate recognition of how Putin's invasion of Ukraine had shattered the existing security architecture of Europe.

Scholz quickly canceled the Nord Stream 2 Baltic gas pipeline project, and Germany has committed more than 6 billion euros in aid to Ukraine since the war began. But Wolfgang Schmidt, Scholz’s chief of staff, acknowledged this week that a budget crunch was likely to prevent Berlin from fulfilling last year’s promise of an increased defense spending.

“We must be honest about this,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Ambition and reality are diverging.”

Zelenskyy has long called out Germany, by far Europe’s biggest economy, to do more in supplying weapons to the front, including Leopard II tanks. Reflecting the frustration some in the alliance have had with Scholz, national security adviser Jake Sullivan made the candid admission on a Sunday talk show that the U.S. only authorized sending its Abrams tanks — which could take up to a year to see the battlefield — to push Germany to send its own vehicles, which can be deployed much sooner.

“There’s no one strong leader that’s really holding the Europeans together. It’s Biden who’s doing it,” said Rachel Rizzo, senior fellow at Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “And without the emergence of Germany as a strong leading actor, we are going to start to see more fissures within the alliance.”

Part of Biden’s task is managing the emerging divide in Europe over how to end the war. Some voices on the continent are urging peace talks now, to limit the human and economic toll. Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have urged Zelenskyy to consider negotiations with Putin to bring the fighting to a close. And Macron last month said that it “has never been the position of France” to “crush Russia,” suggesting that it would be acceptable for Putin to remain in power and Russia to retain its military power if the fighting stopped.

Others in Europe hold a decidedly different view. After Biden’s triumphant secret visit to Kyiv last week, he traveled to Warsaw where he delivered a rousing speech about European unity. But the next day, in a closed-door meeting, Biden had to deliver a reminder to the Bucharest Nine — a group of Eastern European countries closest to Russia’s border — that the goal of the war was not to end Putin’s regime, according to officials not authorized to discuss private conversations. Biden himself once declared that Putin “cannot remain in power” but his administration has since backed away from the claim.

The Bucharest Nine, or B9, has most acutely felt Putin’s threat and has suggested that the only way to prevent an eventual Russian invasion of their own countries is to cripple Moscow for good. That has placed Biden in a delicate spot: a president who has sent an enormous military stockpile to Kyiv along with pledges to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” with disagreements over what offramps to take and amid growing Republican resistance for open-ended U.S. involvement in the conflict.

“We still need a strategy. Where are we going to be a year from now? I don’t think that Biden or anyone on his team has articulated that,” said Brett Bruen, a former State Department official in the Obama administration. “We’re past days of dancing around the sensitivities of one country or one political leader. We have got to either give Ukraine what it is going to take to win or we need to rethink the game plan.”

Faced with these political realities, Biden has leaned more on audacious set pieces to keep support for Ukraine intact. His trip to Kyiv — which aides believe helped inject momentum into the war effort — came after months of Biden wanting to travel there.

Very few White House officials, even senior ones, were read in on the plan, which involved him making a covert, 10-hour train trip ahead of his previously announced visit to Poland. Other means of travel were considered and dismissed, said aides not authorized to speak publicly about security measures. Driving might have been possible, but there were concerns about transporting enough escort vehicles to Poland as well as concerns about stops to refuel and dangers posed by the quality of Ukraine’s shelled roads.

Another option was to defiantly fly in on Air Force One. Proponents of that idea believed it would reflect a powerful show of resolve and signal that Russia was not to be feared, aides said. Ultimately, Moscow was given notice of the trip and U.S. officials believed that Putin and his military would not try anything against the presidential plane out of fear of retaliation. But the idea was tossed aside because the skies over Ukraine were not secure and there was no way to guarantee that a rogue actor on the ground might not try to down the instantly recognizable aircraft.

The centerpiece events of Biden’s trip to Eastern Europe went off spectacularly, aides believe. But what followed was Biden’s message to the Bucharest Nine, underscoring the challenges of holding the alliance together.

Kyiv, too, has not always been on the same page with the rest of the alliance. Zelenskyy has vowed not to negotiate until Russia has abandoned all of the Ukrainian territory it has seized — a declaration that includes Crimea, which Moscow forcibly annexed in 2014. But U.S. officials have sent signals to Kyiv that trying to retake Crimea would be difficult — and perhaps a mistake, potentially crossing a red line for Putin that would trigger an escalation.

U.S. officials are skeptical that Putin’s battered and humiliated military can conquer Kyiv but they do believe the Russian leader has no inclination to abandon his bloody quest. Possessing a massive manpower advantage and seemingly little consideration for the loss of life, Putin continues to throw waves of men into battle.

“Putin has not shown any interest in ending this war, so we will continue to help Ukraine succeed on the battlefield so they can be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table for when that time comes,” said National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson. “That’s why we are working closely with our allies and partners, including Germany, to get Ukraine the weapons and equipment they need to defend itself against Russia’s invasion.”

Even a frozen conflict, one that weakens Ukraine and the West, would be perceived as a partial win for Putin, U.S. officials believe. Most intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic believe the war, as currently fought, could stretch for years. While that would end up draining each nation’s military and economy, the Biden administration has begun to loudly sound the alarm that Moscow may soon have help on the way.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week declared that the U.S. believes China is considering sending lethal military aid to Russia, a development that could change the war’s trajectory. Much like it did on the eve of Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration broadcast its intelligence with the hope that the public threats may deter Beijing from acting. U.S. intelligence officials believe China has not yet decided on a course of action, a senior official said.

Though a move to help Moscow would bring severe economic repercussions from the West, China may consider propping up Putin enough to allow him to save face and wind the war down with some gains. That, in turn, would allow him to keep power and not bring instability to China’s borders. Additionally, U.S. analysts believe, China may be trying to ensnare the U.S. and its allies in a lengthy proxy conflict, draining their resources and potentially making it less of a threat if Beijing were to move on Taiwan.

“Their economy is based on globalization and they have to know that helping Russia will lead to sanctions and endanger that so we have to ask ourselves, ‘What do they have to gain?’” said Hagar Chemali, a former National Security Council and Treasury Department official under Obama. “Helping Russia would make things more difficult for Ukraine and more expensive for the U.S.”

“And this we know: Xi is not rash,” Chemali said. “He always plays the long game.”