One 12 months ago, President Joe Biden was bracing for the worst as Russia massed troops in preparation to invade Ukraine.
As many within the West and even in Ukraine doubted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, the White House was adamant: War was coming and Kyiv was woefully outgunned.
In Washington, Biden’s aides prepared contingency plans and even drafts of what the president would say should Ukraine’s capital quickly fall to Russian forces — a scenario deemed likely by most U.S. officials. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was offered help getting out of his country if he wanted it.
Yet as Russia’s invasion reaches the one-year mark, town stands and Ukraine has beaten even its own expectations, buoyed by a U.S.-led alliance that has agreed to equip Ukrainian forces with tanks, advanced air defense systems, and more, while keeping the Kyiv government afloat with tens of billions of dollars in direct assistance.
For Biden, Ukraine was an unexpected crisis, but one that matches squarely into his larger foreign policy outlook that america and like-minded allies are within the midst of a generational conflict to exhibit that liberal democracies akin to the U.S. can out-deliver autocracies.
Within the estimation of the White House, the war transformed what had been Biden’s rhetorical warnings — a staple of his 2020 campaign speeches — into an urgent call to motion.
Now, as Biden prepares to travel to Poland to mark the anniversary of the war, he faces a legacy-defining moment.
“President Biden’s task is to make the case for sustained free world support for Ukraine,” said Daniel Fried, a U.S. ambassador to Poland in the course of the Clinton administration and now a distinguished fellow on the Atlantic Council. “That is a vital trip. And really, Biden can define the role of the free world in turning back tyranny.”
Biden administration officials are quick to direct primary credit for Ukraine’s endurance to the courage of its armed forces, with a supporting role to the Russian military’s ineptitude. But in addition they imagine that without their early warnings and the huge support they orchestrated, Ukraine would have been all but wiped off the map by now.
Sustaining Ukraine’s fight, while keeping the war from escalating right into a potentially catastrophic wider conflict with NATO, will go down as one among Biden’s enduring foreign policy accomplishments, they argue.
In Poland, Biden is ready to fulfill with allies to reassure them of the U.S. commitment to the region and to helping Ukraine “so long as it takes.” It is a pledge that’s met with skepticism each at home and abroad because the invasion enters its second 12 months, and as Putin shows no signs of retreating from an invasion that has left greater than 100,000 of his own forces killed or wounded, together with tens of hundreds of Ukrainian service members and civilians — and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Biden’s job now could be, partially, to steer Americans — and a worldwide audience — that it’s more necessary than ever to remain within the fight, while cautioning that an endgame is unlikely to return quickly.
His visit to Poland is a possibility to make the case to “countries that repudiate archaic notions of imperial conquest and wars of aggression in regards to the have to proceed to support Ukraine and oppose Russia,” said John Sullivan, who stepped down because the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in September. “We at all times preach, we’re looking for to guard a rules-based international order. It’s completely done if Russia gets away with this.”
The U.S. resolve to get up to Russia can be being tested by domestic concerns and economic uncertainty.
Forty-eight percent of the U.S. public say they favor the U.S. providing weapons to Ukraine, with 29% opposed and 22% saying they’re neither in favor nor opposed, in response to a poll published this past week by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It’s evidence of slipping support since May 2022, lower than three months into the war, when 60% of U.S. adults said they were in favor of sending Ukraine weapons.
Further, Americans are about evenly divided on sending government funds on to Ukraine, with 37% in favor and 38% opposed, with 23% saying neither, in response to the AP-NORC poll.
This month, 11 House Republicans introduced what they called the “Ukraine fatigue” resolution urging Biden to finish military and financial aid to Ukraine, while pushing Ukraine and Russia to return to a peace agreement. Meanwhile, the more traditionalist national security wing of the GOP, including just-announced 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a former U.N. envoy, has critiqued the pace of U.S. assistance, pressing for the quicker transfer of more advanced weaponry.
“Don’t have a look at Twitter, have a look at people in power,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told the Munich Security Conference on Friday. “We’re committed to helping Ukraine.”
But Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said he wants the president and his administration to impress on allies the necessity to share the burden as Americans grow weary of current levels of U.S. spending to help Ukraine and Baltic allies.
Sullivan said he hears from Alaskans, “Hey, senator, why are we spending all this? And the way come the Europeans aren’t?”
From the start of his administration, Biden has argued the world is at a vital moment pitting autocracies against democracies.
The argument was originally framed with China in mind as America’s biggest economic and military adversary, and with Biden seeking to reorient U.S. foreign policy toward the Pacific. The pivot toward Asia is an effort that every of his recent predecessors tried and failed to finish as war and foreign policy crises elsewhere shifted their attention.
With that goal, Biden sought to quickly end the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan seven months into his term. The top to America’s longest war was darkened by a chaotic withdrawal as 13 U.S. troops and 169 Afghan civilians seeking to flee the country were killed by a bombing near Kabul’s international airport carried out by the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate.
U.S. officials say the choice to withdraw from Afghanistan has given the administration the bandwidth and resources to concentrate on assisting Ukraine in the primary land war in Europe since World War II while putting increased concentrate on countering China’s assertive actions within the Indo-Pacific.
While the war in Ukraine caused large price increases in energy and food markets — exacerbating rampant and protracted inflation — Biden aides saw domestic advantages to the president. The war, they argued, allowed Biden to showcase his ability to work across the aisle to take care of funding for Ukraine and showcase his leadership on the worldwide stage.
Nonetheless the months ahead unfold, it’s almost certain to be messy.
While Biden last 12 months needed to walk back a public call for regime change in Russia that he had delivered off the cuff from Poland just weeks after the war began, U.S. officials increasingly see internal discontent and domestic pressures on Putin as key to ending the conflict.
“So how does it end?” Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said at an event this past week in Washington to mark the approaching anniversary. “It ends with a secure, viable Ukraine. It ends with Putin limping back off the battlefield. I hope it ends eventually with a Russian citizenry, who also says, ‘That was a foul deal for us and we wish a greater future.'”
When Biden hosted Zelenskyy in Washington in December, the U.S. president encouraged him to pursue a “just peace” — a framing that the Ukrainian leader chafed against.
“For me as a president, ‘just peace’ is not any compromises,” Zelenskyy said. He said the war would end once Ukraine’s sovereignty, freedom and territorial integrity were restored, and Russia had paid back Ukraine for all of the damage inflicted by its forces.
“There cannot be any ‘just peace’ within the war that was imposed on us,” he added.