WASHINGTON —President Joe Biden signed a modern-day Lend-Lease Act on Monday, 81 years after the original version helped lead the way into World War II, effectively thrusting the United States even deeper into another war in Europe that has increasingly become an epic struggle with Russia despite his efforts to define its limits.
Recent days have underscored just how engaged the United States has become in the conflict in Ukraine. In addition to the new lending program, which will waive time-consuming requirements to speed arms to Ukraine, Biden has proposed $33 billion more in military and humanitarian aid, a package that congressional Democrats plan to increase by another $7 billion. He sent his wife for a secret visit to the war zone. And he provided intelligence helping Ukraine to kill a dozen generals and sink Russia’s flagship.
But even after two and a half months, Biden is still anxious about appearing that the United States is fighting the proxy war that President Vladimir Putin of Russia says it is. While Biden publicly sends aid and signed the lend-lease bill on camera, off camera he was livid over leaks about the American intelligence assistance to Ukraine that led to the deaths of Russian generals and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva out of concern that it would provoke Putin into the escalation that Biden has strenuously sought to avoid.
After reports in The New York Times and NBC News about the intelligence, Biden called Pentagon chief Lloyd J. Austin III; Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence; and William J. Burns, the CIA director, to chastise them, according to a senior administration official. That seemed to be where Biden was drawing a line — providing Ukraine with guns to shoot Russian soldiers was OK, but providing Ukraine with specific information to help them shoot Russians was best left secret and undisclosed to the public.
From the start of the war, the administration sought to parse its response, deciding which weapons could be called defensive and therefore were acceptable to send to Ukraine and which ones could be called offensive and therefore should not be delivered.
But the line has shifted in recent weeks with the administration shipping ever more sophisticated military equipment and expressing more openly its ambitions not just to help the Ukrainians but to defeat and even enfeeble Russia. After a visit to the war-torn capital, Kiev, two weeks ago, Austin declared that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things” it has done in Ukraine again, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during her own subsequent trip to Kyiv that America
“will stand with Ukraine until victory is won.”
Some veteran government officials said Biden was right to be cautious about too overtly poking Putin, because the consequences of an escalation with a nuclear-armed Russia are too devastating to take chances with.
On Possible Nuclear Conflict
Asked if Russia would rule out a preemptive tactical nuclear strike on Ukraine, Russia’s deputy foreign minister said on Tuesday that a decision on the possible use of nuclear weapons was clearly set out in Russia’s military doctrine, RIA reported.
“We have a military doctrine - everything is written there,” Alexander Grushko was quoted by state news agency RIA as saying.
Russia’s official military deployment principles allow for the use of nuclear weapons if they - or other types of weapons of mass destruction - are used against it, or if the Russian state faces an existential threat from conventional weapons.
The decision to use Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal, the biggest in the world, rests with President Putin.
The conflict has killed thousands of people, displaced nearly 10 million, and raised fears of a wider confrontation between Russia and the United States - by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said on Saturday that Putin believes he cannot afford to lose in Ukraine and cautioned that the West could not ignore the risk of the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Moscow.
“We don’t see, as an intelligence community, practical evidence at this point of Russian planning for a deployment or even use of tactical nuclear weapons,” Burns said.
He cautioned, though, that “the stakes are very high for Putin’s Russia.”
A decree signed by Putin on June 2, 2020, said Russia views its nuclear weapons as “exclusively a means of deterrence”.
It repeats the phraseology of the military doctrine but adds details about four circumstances under which a nuclear strike would be ordered. These include reliable information of a ballistic missile attack on Russia and an enemy’s attack “on critical state or military installations of the Russian Federation, the incapacitation of which would lead to the disruption of a response by nuclear forces.”
Putin, who has repeatedly expressed resentment over the way the West treated Russia after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, says Ukraine has been used by the United States to threaten Russia.
He justified his Feb. 24 order for a special military operation by saying Ukraine had persecuted Russian speakers and the United States was keen to enlarge the NATO military alliance in a way that would endanger Russia.
Biden said Monday he is worried that Putin does not have a way out of the Ukraine war.
Speaking at a political fund raising event in Maryland on Monday night Biden said Putin was “very calculating”.
Biden said he was worried that the Russian leader “doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that”.
Ukraine said on Tuesday its forces had recaptured villages from Russian troops north and northeast of Kharkiv, pressing a counter-offensive that could signal a shift in the war’s momentum and jeopardize Russia’s main advance.
Tetiana Apatchenko, press officer for the 92nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, the main Ukrainian force in the area, confirmed that Ukrainian troops had recaptured the settlements of Cherkaski Tyshky, Ruski Tyshki, Borshchova and Slobozhanske, in a pocket north of Kharkiv in recent days.
Yuriy Saks, an adviser to Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said the successes were pushing Russian forces out of range of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which has been under perpetual bombardment since the war began.
The counterattack could signal a new phase in the war, with Ukraine now going on the offensive after weeks in which Russia mounted a massive assault without making a breakthrough.
By pushing back Russian forces who had occupied the outskirts of Kharkiv since the start of the invasion, the Ukrainians are moving into striking distance of the rear supply lines sustaining the main Russian attack force further south.
“They’re trying to cut in and behind the Russians to cut off the supply lines, because that’s really one of their (the Russians’) main weaknesses,” said Neil Melvin of the RUSI think-tank in London.
“Ukrainians are getting close to the Russian border. So all the gains that the Russians made in the early days in the northeast of Ukraine are increasingly slipping away.”
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Tuesday Washington believes Russia still plans for a long war, aiming to capture more of Ukraine than just the eastern Donbas region that has been the main focus of its assault this month.
Putin was counting on the Western resolve to weaken over time, Haines told lawmakers.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Ukraine on Tuesday and toured Bucha, becoming the first German cabinet minister to visit Ukraine since the start of the war, days or weeks after visits by senior officials from other Western countries. Kiev has rebuked the Berlin government for being slow to disavow years of economic ties with Russia.
In Odesa, firefighters battled blazes until the early hours of Tuesday after seven Russian missiles hit a shopping centre and depot on Monday.
The number of Ukrainians who have fled their country since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 was approaching 6 million, according to the United Nations, which says the refugee crisis is the fastest growing since World War Two.