Has Biden Left Himself Any Room On Ukraine?

Biden may have to shift to a plan B, but can he do it after insisting the freedom of the global world order is at stake?

by Branko Marcetic, Responsible Statecraft

Before the summer, we had the broad outline of what the endgame of the war in Ukraine would look like: Kyiv would train and build up its forces, launch a summer offensive, reclaim as much territory as it could, and finally enter peace talks with the strongest negotiating hand possible and bring the war to a close.

Now, two months into that offensive and with summer’s end nearing, that scenario looks increasingly unlikely. The Ukrainian offensive has by all accounts stalled, as often exhausted, inexperienced, and hastily trained troops are running headfirst into dug-in and heavily mined Russian defenses, at horrific human cost.

President Joe Biden and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy attend a joint news briefing, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine

This is all being reported, too, in major American media, including CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times. These and other outlets, which have been explicitly supportive of Ukraine’s war effort, have begun painting quite a bleak picture of the situation on the ground.

Ukrainian forces are expending materiel at an unsustainable rate, using up 90,000 shells a month when the Pentagon is only producing a third of that, while 20 percent of the NATO weaponry it deployed was damaged or destroyed in the first two weeks. In light of the limited gains made by the offensive, President Joe Biden is now asking Congress for $20.6 billion more in aid for Ukraine, stressing that “the United States is committed to maintaining strong global opposition to Russia’s illegal war.”