Former U.S. president Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the NATO Summit in Washington in July, 2024.Susan Walsh/The Canadian Press
Two weeks after his anointed successor lost the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Joe Biden finally authorized Ukraine to use American long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russia. Like most of his actions since Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden’s move came too late to change the course of the war.
For almost three years, as the war endured on his watch, Mr. Biden dithered each time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked for more powerful or effective U.S. weapons to defend his country. By the time Ukraine got the HIMAR short-range missiles, Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets it had sought, they arrived too late. More territory had been lost to Russia and thousands more Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.
And so it was with the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, that Mr. Biden authorized just before leaving office. The weapons were needed to help Ukraine hold on to territory it had taken in Russia’s Kursk region. But by April, Kursk was back in Russian hands.
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Critics of Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine do seem to be suffering from a convenient case of amnesia. It was Mr. Biden’s unwillingness to act decisively to give Ukraine the upper hand that allowed the war to endure, with its estimated 1.4 million casualties and hundreds of thousands of deaths (on both sides) and counting.
And Mr. Trump is criticized because he is actively seeking to stop this horror?
Granted it has been hard to watch Mr. Putin, a modern-day despot, get the red-carpet treatment from Mr. Trump, as he did at their meeting in Alaska on Aug. 15. And it is hard not to worry that Mr. Trump, given his deep need for praise and recognition, is too easily manipulated by the cold-blooded former KGB agent.
Still, there is no evidence that Mr. Trump has thrown Ukraine under the bus. What’s more, you cannot assess his unorthodox diplomatic efforts to end the war without considering the alternatives or admitting that nothing else has worked so far.
Proponents of unlimited U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine insist that only a sustained military onslaught can force Mr. Putin to retreat. But Mr. Biden rejected this approach because he feared it would lead to an escalation of the war and put the United States in direct conflict with Russia. That concern still exists in Washington, and Ukraine fatigue is bipartisan.
Besides, Ukraine is running out of troops to fight this war. Thousands of valiant Ukrainian soldiers have been on the battlefield since 2022; some have been there since fighting broke out in Donbas in 2011. Ukraine has enacted a draft of all men between 25 and 60 and even allows those older than 60 to enlist voluntarily.
Mr. Putin has his own recruitment problems. But unlike Mr. Zelensky, who must consider the decimation the war has caused for a lost generation of Ukrainian men, the Russian leader does not care how many of his soldiers die or are maimed for life. He has no conscience.
So, if the West is unprepared to stop him directly on the battlefield – and for all their expressions of solidarity with Ukraine, European leaders are not prepared to go that far – then there is no alternative to a negotiated settlement. Or at least, it must be said, a settlement that does not create the conditions for another war down the road, or compromises Ukraine’s sovereignty.
That does not mean Ukraine will not need to make territorial concessions.
“[A]llowing Russia to retain de facto control of seized Ukrainian territory has always been a part of the expected dealmaking,” Council on Foreign Relations president Michael Froman wrote in February. “The bigger issue, which remains unresolved, is what sort of security guarantees Ukraine will get once the fighting stops.”
It was always a fantasy that Ukraine, a young democracy with limited state capacity and plagued by corruption, could become a NATO member any time soon. That the Trump administration is considering granting NATO-like security guarantees to Ukraine (in exchange for territorial concessions) is a huge gain for Mr. Zelensky. He, and other Western leaders, will need to push Mr. Trump to make it a reality.
It will take more to stop Mr. Putin, who has intensified Russian drone and missile attacks in recent days, than the red-carpet treatment from Mr. Trump. At the very least, it will likely take more Western military aid to Ukraine for some time, and increased sanctions on Russia and those who abet its actions, to change his calculus.
Mr. Biden was never willing to take the steps needed to either secure a Ukrainian victory or reach a negotiated peace. He left it for his successor to solve this war. That Mr. Trump happens to be trying is more than his critics seem able to bear. That is just odd.