WASHINGTON – When President Biden met with his Western allies in Europe three months ago, the world was uniting behind Ukraine, and NATO suddenly had a new sense of purpose – its old goal, limiting Russia. There was talk of “crippling sanctions.” President Vladimir Putin was stepping down and there was talk in the air of victory.
Mr Biden is returning to Europe on Saturday night at a time when everything around the war is more difficult. While Russia’s oil exports have fallen sharply, its revenues have actually risen, a function of rising fuel prices. After concentrating its efforts in southern and eastern Ukraine, Russia made gradual but significant gains as the besieged Ukrainians began to give up key cities: first Mariupol and now, to the east, Severodonetsk.
So Mr Biden must prepare his allies for a severe conflict – a return to the “long struggle at dusk” that President John F. Kennedy spoke of during the Cold War – amid food and energy market turmoil and inflation in scale few imagined six months ago. Not surprisingly, several cracks are already emerging, as popular discontent and the upcoming elections are beginning to worry Allied leaders.
White House officials say none of this will stop Mr Biden from putting even more pressure on Russia, and the last few weeks have included behind-the-scenes efforts to reach agreements on new ways to isolate Moscow.
John F. Kirby, a former Pentagon spokesman who moved to the White House to co-ordinate reports on Mr Biden’s military objectives, told reporters on Thursday to expect new measures to “target Russia’s defense supply chain and to continue to fight evasion from these unprecedented sanctions “- a seeming warning to China and India, which continue to buy Russian oil at a discount.
Mr Kirby said Moscow began to hurt four months after the war. “Because of our actions, Russia is struggling to make bond payments, approaching default,” he said. “And our measures will only tighten the bolts and limit the revenue Putin needs to finance this war.
The White House also plans to announce new steps to strengthen NATO’s capabilities, including a new “strategic concept” for the alliance, the first in a decade. At the time, there was still talk of Russia’s integration into Europe; today it looks fantastic.
Key among the concrete steps will be the creation of new cyber-rapid forces that can intervene to help protect NATO members – both Sweden and Finland, both countries with pending requests – against intensified cyber attacks designed to frighten. Similar commitments have been made before, but Ann Neuberger, the president’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, said in an interview that NATO should use the expertise and intelligence gathering of its most qualified cyber-conflict operators.
“We realized the need for a virtual capability to respond quickly to an incident if an ally suffered a significant cyber attack and asked for support,” Ms. Neuberger said on Friday. “This really reflects the lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine scenario, namely that if you prepare in advance and train in advance, you know how to react quickly.
Better understand the Russia-Ukraine war
But the question that arises will be how to deal with Mr Putin, at a time when Russia has been transformed from another European power into a pariah state. His isolation will deepen, US officials say. But when French President Emmanuel Macron said in May that the West should oppose Mr Putin’s “temptation to humiliate” it was one of the first public signs of a rift in the main strategy for pushing the Russian leader apart. to send NATO troops into battle, a step Mr Biden and other NATO leaders say they have no intention of taking.
“Compared to the March trip, Biden faces an increased trade-off between domestic and foreign policy goals,” said Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Center for a New American Security Research Group in Washington. “His priority will be to increase pressure on Russia and aid to Ukraine, but to do so when the West worries about oil and food prices, remaining arms supplies and a war that sees no end.
For now, Mr Biden is under little political pressure at home to back down. Most of the debate over how much to heat up Mr Putin without provoking a serious escalation in the war is being held behind closed doors among his staff.
Updated
June 25, 2022, 5:43 p.m. ET
But there are fears that rising gas prices and the cost of maintaining an armed and well-fed Ukraine will begin to dwindle enthusiasm, especially if Mr Putin tackles recent threats to cut gas supplies to Europe in the autumn. Mr Fontaine said: “All the leaders he will meet are in the same common dilemma, and elections are looming in the United States and elsewhere. The unity of the West is high, the support for Ukraine is still very strong, and the desire to oppose Russia is real.
But he also said the summits “demonstrate how resilient the various lines of effort will be as the war itself grinds”.
This is the new, crushing nature of the conflict that distinguishes these two summits – the Group of 7 meeting, the gathering of the world’s richest major democracies, the Schloss Elmau in Germany and then NATO, starting on Wednesday in Madrid. – from those who have walked before.
Just two months ago, the Americans spoke openly of victory over the Russians and of the reasonable-sounding hope that Mr Putin’s forces would be forced to withdraw to the positions they held before the February 24 invasion. At the end of his last speech on this trip to Warsaw, after a visit by refugees fleeing across the border to Poland, Mr Biden said this to Mr Putin: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot stay in power.’
White House aides immediately said that the United States was not seeking to initiate regime change, just as it had fought a month later when Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, speaking accurately, albeit too directly, about America’s strategic goals, said: “We want to see Russia weakened to the point that it cannot do the things it did when it invaded Ukraine.
Mr Biden is now more cautious in his public tone, even if his goals remain fundamentally unchanged. The question is whether he can begin to move allies from a crisis response to a protracted response to the invasion, knowing that costs will rise and pressure will increase as Mr Putin tries to use every weapon at his disposal – such as restricting gas exports and continuing to block Ukrainian grain exports – to exert influence on its opponents.
“It is natural for people and governments to lose interest in conflicts as they drag on,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, wrote this month in the Foreign Affair. The world stopped paying attention to the war in Libya after Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi fell, he later added, and “separated from Syria, Yemen and other ongoing conflicts that once generated front-page news.” The same thing happened after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he said.
“The compromise with Russia may seem tempting to some abroad, especially with the rising cost of the war,” he concluded, saying the only way was a “complete and total Ukrainian victory.”
In public, everyone will agree. Although Mr Biden will not say much about this during the summits, the debate in his own administration on what to send and what to keep at home is repeated every week in the Situation Room.
Mr Biden, he says, is constantly assessing whether new weapons – such as the modern artillery that has just arrived on the battlefield or the advanced drones the White House is now considering sending – would escalate the war too quickly and give Putin more. an excuse for revenge. But he also wants to make sure Mr Putin loses ground.
Holding the cursor over the two meetings will be this dangerous moment for the world economy. Inflation erupted in the United States and Europe, driven by supply disruptions to the Covid-19 pandemic; increasing consumer demand as economies reopen; and in recent months a jump in food and energy prices caused by the Russian invasion. Rapid price increases have hurt workers and families in Group of 7 countries and undermined the position of their leaders in opinion polls – especially Mr Biden.
Despite all their calls for unity, leaders will be pressured to find quick and concrete ways to work together to help alleviate this economic and political pain. They are ready to discuss infrastructure investments and other ways to uncover global supply chains; new steps to counter China’s trade practices, which US leaders and others call predatory; and a number of problems related to inflation. But everyone fears that rising interest rates could be a prelude to a recession.
Perhaps most urgently for Mr Biden, leaders are expected to discuss ways to reduce world oil prices – and with them prices for petrol pump drivers – including possible changes in the way European nations seek to harm Russian oil export business.
Leaders are also expected to devote considerable time to discussing global agriculture and how to increase food supplies around the world as the war cuts off access to critical food sources for both rich and poor countries. So far, the Biden administration’s efforts to find a way out of Ukraine for its agricultural products have failed. Russia is doing what it can to tighten the noose in what appears to be an attempt to bring President Vladimir Zelensky’s country to economic collapse.
For European allies, keeping Ukraine afloat while limiting Russia is a mission that was hardly discussed when the allies met a year ago. “The Russian …
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