Biden’s Parting Gift to Trump: Major Escalation in Ukraine Inching Us Closer to War With Russia

If President Joe Biden wanted to make things as hard as possible for his successor, early indications are that he’ll be doing a bang-up job of it.

In a move that could widen a war President-elect Donald Trump has indicated he wants to negotiate an end to, The Wall Street Journal reported late Sunday that the White House would allow Ukrainian forces to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to attack within Russia.

That marks a significant escalation in terms of the rules of engagement with Western-supplied weapons. While Biden administration officials had hinted that such a move might be on the table back in May, nothing had come of it during the presidential campaign.

The impetus for the move, the Journal’s Gordon Lubuld and Alexander Ward reported, was the mobilization of North Korean troops to buttress Russian forces attempting to retake territory Kyiv secured during an August offensive in Russia.

The missiles, the Journal reported, “could initially target positions in the Kursk region, where Russia has amassed more than 50,000 troops, including some 10,000 soldiers from North Korea, in an effort to recapture the territory.”

“The introduction of thousands of North Korean troops onto the battlefield and the expected Kursk operation led to a change in Biden’s calculus, U.S. officials and other people familiar with the deliberations said,” the report noted.

“Biden made the decision before he left Thursday for South America, one of his last foreign trips as president, said one of the people.”

The New York Times, who also reported on the White House’s decision, noted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hinted, during a Sunday address, that just as important as the lifting of the restrictions against using Western-made missiles inside Russian territory would be increasing the number of missiles being supplied to Ukrainian forces.

“Today, many in the media are talking about the fact that we have received permission to take appropriate actions,” Zelenskyy said in a nightly address.

“But blows are not inflicted with words. Such things are not announced. The rockets will speak for themselves.”

Previously, the Times noted, only short-range Western missiles were allowed to be fired inside Russian territory under the rules set by the Americans.

“To help the Ukrainians defend Kharkiv, Mr. Biden allowed them to use the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which have a range of about 50 miles, against Russian forces directly across the border,” the Times noted.

“But Mr. Biden did not allow the Ukrainians to use longer-range ATACMS, which have a range of about 190 miles, in defense of Kharkiv.”

The change is officially designed to dissuade the North Koreans from sending more troops, given that longer-range weapons put their forces in danger.

However, the subtext is clear: The Biden administration wants to jam through as much of its Ukraine policy as possible before Biden leaves office.

“The policy shift appears to be part of a Biden administration push to give what it can to Ukraine before Jan. 20. The decision comes a week after the administration opted to allow American defense contractors into Ukraine for the first time to help fix Western weaponry and aircraft, including the American Patriot missile defense system and the F-16 jet fighter,” the Journal reported.

“The administration is also scrambling to get more than $7 billion in weaponry to Ukraine before Biden leaves office,  fearing that the incoming administration will curtail Ukraine arms shipments.”

Yes, and probably not without good reason. Keep in mind that the reason this wasn’t done earlier was because allowing Kyiv to fire long-range missiles into Russian territory would risk further escalating the conflict to the point that could begin to metastasize to the outside world. The Kremlin, not wrongly, would begin to view the weapons shipments less as material support of Ukraine and more of a proxy war being fought between NATO and Russia.

Just so we’re clear, then: The incoming administration, elected rather decisively, campaigned on the notion that a negotiated peace is the best path forward in a conflict that, after more than two years, remains a meat-grinder stalemate. As much as we may want Ukraine to win, the logistics simply aren’t on their side no matter how much material support they receive from NATO. The only win, in a conventional military sense, would involve a far wider conflict — one which would reasonably be termed World War III because of the scope of the alliances pitted against one another that it would entail.

That’s unlikely to happen, although it’s a little bit more likely than it was on Saturday thanks to this move. What Biden administration has undoubtedly signed the people of Eastern Europe up for by shoving all this through at the last minute, however, is a more intense stalemate that grinds even more meat — presumably, in part, to defeat any hope the new president can get the negotiated peace he campaigned and won on.

In other words, this is naked sabotage. It is a man with a failed mandate doubling down on that failure. The Ukrainians have fought a valiant struggle — but they’ve fought it for 33 months and are no closer to anything resembling victory. Nor, in fact, does anyone on the West’s side have a concrete idea of what victory — or even, at least, the avoidance of defeat — looks like.

More missiles, more planes, more money — that gets us no closer to that vision. What it gets us closer to is a deeply protracted conflict that infects more and more of the nations it touches, all in the name of making it that much more difficult for the next leader of the free world to find a cure.

Nice parting gift, that.

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