The announcement this week that the Biden administration has reversed course and given Ukraine permission to use American ATACMS missiles to attack target inside Russia and is supplying anti-personnel mines to the beleaguered state is an astonishing course reversal, intended, it would appear, to cynically mire the incoming Trump administration in the
morass Democrats have created in Eastern Europe.
Rather than helping the Ukrainians win, having committed the United States, and our NATO allies, to supporting Ukraine from the beginning of the war, Biden has arbitrarily and capriciously limited the supply of American weapons to Ukraine and the rules of engagement for their use.
The result of Biden’s unconscionable policies has been to withhold or limit the use of American weapons at key points in the war where they could have been decisive for the Ukrainians, and then to relent and allow them once Ukraine has suffered enormous casualties holding its lines.
The first example of this inhumane policy was Biden’s refusal to provide Ukraine American aircraft or to allow our NATO allies to provide aircraft from their stocks. The result was that in the early days of the war the Russians ruled the skies over Ukraine and attacked civilian targets with regularity and devastating effect.
Then, after Russia had savaged Ukrainian population centers for over two years, Biden relented and agreed to the transfer of 19 F-16 fighters to Ukraine. Out of the 19 aircraft promised, only six of the 1970s era aircraft have been delivered, two of them arriving from Denmark on the 1,000th day of the war.
As our friend Maya Carlin reported in an article for The National Interest, although Kyiv had requested F-16s for some time, a senior military official subsequently declared that the fighters were “no longer relevant” to the country’s war efforts. As detailed by The Defense Post, a high-ranking Ukrainian official said the arrival of these fighter jets was too little, too late.
“Often, we just don’t get the weapons systems at the time we need them – they come when they’re no longer relevant,” he said. “F-16s were needed in 2023; they won’t be right for 2024.”
Biden similarly waffled on supplying Ukraine with modern NATO tanks, such as the American Abrams, German Leopard and British Challenger.
In January 2023 the BBC reported Biden’s decision to supply the western tanks “is an abrupt reversal after longstanding Pentagon arguments that they are a poor fit for the Ukrainian battlefield.”
From the beginning of the war, the BBC reported, “the Biden administration and its allies have carefully calibrated their weapons deliveries to avoid provoking a Russian escalation.”
Except the Russians didn’t need any provocation to “escalate” their goal was to win.
Ultimately, the American tanks were purchased from private contractors, not sent from Pentagon stocks, so it took many months - nearly a year in fact - before they got to Ukraine.
During that time thousands of Ukrainian soldiers died as the Russians pushed deeper into their country in grinding attacks reminiscent of World War I’s bloodiest battles.
Russian forces, which have been on the offensive for more than a year, have been advancing at their fastest rate since 2022 in eastern Ukraine and exerting pressure in the northeast and southeast. Ukraine has lobbied for the change for months, arguing its inability to hit areas inside Russia, and in particular military airbases hosting warplanes involved in strikes on Ukraine, was a major handicap to Ukrainian operations, Reuters reported.
Now, two months before leaving office, President Joe Biden lifted some restrictions that have blocked Kyiv from using U.S.-supplied weapons for strikes deeper into Russian territory, in a major policy change, Reuters reported on Sunday.
Biden’s reversal and authorization of long-range Ukrainian strikes with American ATACMS missiles could help Kyiv defend the foothold in Russia's Kursk region that it seized as leverage in any war talks, but the decision may come too late to change the course of the war, analysts told Reuters.
"The decision comes late, and like other decisions in this vein, it may be too late to substantially change the course of the fighting," said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
On the streets of Kyiv on Monday, the general feeling was that the decision would help, but that it had come far too late.
"This should have been used either as a preventative measure, or as a sharp reaction in February or March 2022. Now it does not play a big role," Reuters reported.
Last month The Wall Street Journal, citing intelligence and undisclosed sources, reported a grim milestone: about one million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded since the war began. The majority of dead are soldiers on both sides, followed by Ukrainian civilians.
One would have to go back to the day when the United States left the freedom fighters of the Bay of Pigs force to die on the beach at the hands of Fidel Castro’s Communist army to find crueler, more cynical and inhumane decisions than those by which the Biden administration has instructed Ukraine in its war to repel the Russian invasion.
President-elect Trump has vowed to bring the war Russia brought to Ukraine to a quick conclusion, which one can only hope means that Joe Biden’s strategy of fighting Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood will soon end.
George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com and is a veteran of over 300 political campaigns. A member of American MENSA, he served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle, as Director of Policy and Communication for former Congressman Adam Putnam (FL-12) then Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, and as spokesman for retired Rep. Mac Thornberry, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
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