President Joe Biden’s sparring match with Congress over emergency aid to Ukraine, without which most analysts predict Ukraine will collapse, has not produced additional billions for Kyiv. Congress delayed the decision till January, when it comes back from the holiday break. But regardless of what transpires in January, Ukraine’s fate is clear: more death and destruction, more bloodshed in 2024.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin is the one who launched the invasion, Biden is equally responsible for the obliteration of Ukraine and annihilation of Ukrainians.
Biden as vice president was the Obama administration go-to person on Ukraine policy and the architect of the Russia “reset” strategy to promote friendship between the two nations. Unfortunately, he ignored intelligence about the threat posed by Russia. As a former senior official in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and one of the top three analysts on Russian doctrine and strategy in the intelligence community, I personally briefed President Obama’s White House national security staff on Putin’s plans and Russia’s war-fighting strategy multiple times.
Biden had to have been made aware of those briefings given his position. And yet, not only did he fail to develop a counterstrategy to deter Putin, Biden and his team, many of whom would later join his presidential administration, continued the dangerous strategy of pushing Ukraine toward NATO membership.
To think that Putin would fail to enforce his version of the Monroe Doctrine and allow NATO to absorb Ukraine, on which Russia relied for its security for centuries, was not simply incompetent. It amounted to signing Ukraine’s death sentence. No sane military commander would allow an adversarial alliance to situate itself along more than 1,000 miles of its border. No U.S. Commander-in-Chief would let China or Russia station its forces in Mexico or Canada. To think that Putin would was delusional.
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Although Biden and NATO—which I also briefed in 2013, in the run up to Putin’s invasion of Crimea—had ample time to develop a plan to change Putin’s decision calculus, they did nothing. You see, it was too complicated for the government bureaucrats. To devise a viable plan to beat Putin, Team Biden had to first understand the Kremlin’s anti-U.S. strategy, or what I call Putin’s Playbook.
The centerpiece of Russia’s strategy in Ukraine has less to do with Ukraine than it does the United States. And President Biden understood that. He knew well that Putin would bring the war to the U.S. homeland and launch a nuclear strike in Europe if Washington provided strategic weapons to Ukraine capable of destroying Russia, or if we deployed forces in the theater. That’s why Biden never authorized a sufficient amount of weaponry to Ukraine to win, opting for virtue signaling instead, or in his words, simply “doing something.”
Biden understood from the very start that Ukraine’s victory was unattainable without putting the U.S. homeland at risk. He warned his donors that the threat of Nuclear Armageddon issued by Putin was real. “[Putin] is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” Biden told his benefactors in October of last year.
Putin’s strategy, which he developed over the course of 20 years, sought to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities, studied by Russia for decades, in order to keep Washington from entering conflict on Russia’s periphery. Moscow was determined to reestablish its strategic security perimeter lost in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. Those vulnerabilities included threats like blackout warfare—using cyberattacks, space weapons, electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) strikes, cutting undersea internet cables, and if all else fails, launching nuclear weapons.
Closing these vulnerabilities or developing counter-measures would require serious intellectual firepower and significant funding. Instead, Biden chose to use the American people as the cash cow and Ukrainians as the flesh to throw in Putin’s meat grinder. To cover up for its failures while sucking U.S. taxpayers dry, Washington deployed a propaganda narrative insisting that it was helping Ukraine fight for its democracy. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, is no more of a democracy than Russia is.
Ukraine is now being wiped out by Russia, which holds an overwhelming military and economic advantage over its former Soviet neighbor. Its industrial base, critical infrastructure, and agricultural foundation are being destroyed. Ukraine is being depopulated, with its casualty toll nearing a quarter of a million dead or wounded. These are young, child-producing males we are talking about. And yet, Biden continues to try to strong arm Congress into coughing up billions more for the Kyiv regime, assuring Americans that victory is right around the corner.
If Congress doesn’t stop Biden, the slaughter of Ukrainians will continue through 2024 and beyond.
Rebekah Koffler is a strategic military intelligence analyst, former senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the author of “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America.” She is Managing Editor of an e-mail newsletter for independent thinkers, CutToTheNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @Rebekah0132.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.