A Biden-shaped hole in the future

In Kyiv at war, everything comes down to a US president in his last days in office

Volodomyr Zelensky, Kyiv, Sept. 13. Photo credits below

KYIV, UKRAINE — “Esteemed participants of the conference,” Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday morning, sounding — for all the world, if only momentarily — like any Chamber of Commerce guy welcoming any random trade convention. “Dear friends of Ukraine. … I am very grateful to you for being with Ukraine.”

Then the Ukrainian president’s tone darkened. “But it is also very important for us to remember what it means to be with Ukraine,” he said. “It’s not about presence. It’s not just about an emotional relationship.”

He surveyed the week’s news from the front. Russian artillery had shelled a village in Donetsk. Three staffers from the International Committee of the Red Cross were killed, but the Red Cross’s own communiqué did not mention Russia. A Russian missile sank a Ukrainian bulk carrier, loaded with grain and bound for Egypt. “And Egypt offered no reaction. None whatsoever, though that was their food security. That's how Russia treats Egypt’s food security and free navigation: the way a typical terrorist does.”

The emerging theme of Zelensky’s remarks was a familiar tension in Ukraine’s defence against Russia. Ukraine could not have survived Vladimir Putin’s attack for this long without massive Western aid. But the aid is never quite enough, and it never arrives quite quickly enough, to turn the tide against Russia. Ukraine knows it is not alone, yet it feels alone.

And all of this — the need for help, the constant uncertainty about whether it will come — is coming to a head. Politics demands it.

This was, indeed, the emerging theme of the whole weekend. I was in Kyiv for the 20th annual Yalta European Strategy conference (inevitably shortened to YES), a leading international gathering to discuss Ukraine’s place in the world. Launched by billionaire businessman Victor Pinchuk in 2004, its original goal was to figure out how to get Ukraine into the European Union, at a time when 10 former Communist countries, including Poland and Hungary, were about to join the EU. When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, the annual meeting moved to a Kyiv hotel ballroom. When he launched the full-scale invasion in 2022, YES became an informal annual council of war.

Fareed Zakaria was there. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of The Economist. Boris Johnson, whose great popularity in Kyiv I will have occasion to explain later in this post. Radek Sikorski, Gabriel Attal, Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum, David Petraeus and much of Ukraine’s military and political leadership. I paid my way there, which means this newsletter’s paying subscribers covered my costs. So the rest of this account is for them, with my deep gratitude.

Back to Zelensky’s opening remarks. “In recent days we had very important guests from the United States, very important visits from the US and UK in particular,” he said. It was a clear reference to a joint visit on Wednesday from Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, and David Lammy, the UK’s new Foreign Secretary.

“We cannot actually reveal all the contents, all the fine detail of the talks between us and the partners,” Zelensky said. “But let me share my feelings.”

What followed seemed to me, at first, a non sequitur. As if Zelensky were free-associating, or even a little confused. “In Ukraine, like many countries in the world, we are beginning the school year. Our children have gone to school, and we want as many children as possible to stay offline — not to study online, but to mingle with other children. Not just a learning environment, but also a social environment. That's life.

“And for this, we need air defense. Patriots.” Ah-ha. Turns out he’d been on topic all along. Zelensky was saying that if Russian cruise missiles can strike targets in Ukraine with impunity, schools can’t operate normally. And by extension, that as long as this conflict continues, there can be no day-to-day life in Ukraine. There are enough Patriot anti-missile batteries in the world to cover Ukraine’s needs, he said. They just take forever to be deployed in Ukraine.

“We have open and frank meetings with our partners,” Zelensky said. “And when we repeat that we need air defenses, it’s very difficult to hear, ‘We are working on this’ for an answer.”

The difficulty of being told “We’re working on it” soon became the leitmotif of Zelensky’s remarks.

He called for a round of applause for “our heroic warriors” who are holding the line at Pokrovsk and throughout the Donbas region. “Big hand indeed, for what they do.” But any army needs reinforcement, especially one in a grinding war of attrition. Thanks to all the allies who offered to help, Zelensky said, but it would be nice if there were more follow-through. “Quite frankly, we are far away from full compliance with the original arrangements. And the arrangement happened a long time ago.

“When we remind people of that, it's very difficult to hear in response, ‘We're working on it.’”

Iran is providing ballistic missiles to Russia, with — of course — no restrictions about where they may land, Zelensky said. Russian drones have begun straying into the airspace of NATO countries. When Ukraine raises these issues with its allies, “they try to talk it out, sometimes even omitting the magic phrase, ‘We’re working on it.’”

All of which helps to explain why the top item on Zelensky’s wish list is permission to strike Russian targets with Western missiles. Realistically that permission will come from Joe Biden, or it won’t come at all, at least not before a new President is inaugurated in January. So far Biden has refused, fearing escalation. Lately, as the Ukrainians press upon him the obvious observation that Putin gets to escalate at whim, his answer has become hard to predict. If he refuses again, Russia can continue to rain death on military and civilian targets in Ukraine with impunity. If he assents, Ukraine’s chance of crushing this monstrous invasion improve, from “slim” to “a little better.”

So Zelensky is preparing one last pitch to the departing President. It will come next week in a meeting between Biden and Zelensky that will take place while world leaders are speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

“We rely on our partners very much,” Zelensky said as he wrapped up his prepared remarks with a writer’s quietly unifying final use of repetition. “We hope for a good result from our partners. At least, we are working on it.”

Fareed Zakaria with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Then Zelensky sat down for an interview with Fareed Zakaria, who hosted many of the sessions at this conference and who moves with such eerie grace I could swear his head were mounted on a Steadicam. Zakaria asked him whether the astonishing Ukrainian incursion onto Russian territory at Kursk made military sense. Zelensky said it did, though the question didn’t seem outrageous to him.

Zakaria asked what came next. Zelensky switched to shaky English and began his answer with a mildly comic touch. “I'm not sure that I can share with you all the details, otherwise you will understand everything,” he told Zakaria. “Because you are smart guy, and you will be the first man [to hear Zelensky’s plan]. Yes, maybe you will feel like the President of the United States.”

Translation: The details of his next plan are reserved, in the first instance, for the President who must decide whether to accept it. “So, I'm so sorry I can't do it. Because I gave my word to President Biden.”

Here I thought I heard in the Ukrainian president’s tone a remarkable poignancy, even as he made a show of merely joshing with a TV anchor. Every moment in Ukraine is fraught, going back decades and even centuries before Feb. 24, 2022. But this moment has its own high drama.

Every Ukrainian who addressed the conference offered variations on the same three-part message. One, Ukraine takes on all the risk in standing up to Putin, and so far has paid by far the heaviest cost. Two, of course Ukrainians understand that without Western support none of this would have been possible. Three, unfortunately the sum of all the Ukrainian blood and Western aid so far has bought only stalemate. Rolling Russia back will require more help, and perhaps more than that, it will require a conceptual breakthrough: the West’s fear of escalation is a license to Putin to escalate.

Depending on events, three people might be able both to make that breakthrough and to deliver the hardware that could change the stakes. One is the current US President. The other two are his potential successors.

Donald Trump shot a 90-second video aboard his campaign plane about the Ukraine conflict at the behest of former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who played the video at the conference. As far as I can see, Trump’s video is the only part of the conference proceedings that doesn’t appear on the otherwise admirably complete Youtube channel of the conference’s organizers, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. But it contained no surprises. The war “never would have happened if I had been President,” Trump said. He pledged to “stop this war,” and boasted of his excellent relationships with Putin and Zelensky. And that was absolutely all of his message.

“Sure, it’s not quite my policy,” admitted Johnson, who remains more popular in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else on earth. His reluctance to sweat the details made him tremendously appealing, during the five and a half months between Putin’s full-scale invasion and his own resignation from office, in a besieged country that was falling quickly out of love with its allies’ tendency to overthink things.

“We’ve got to be clear with Russia,” Johnson interjected during his own panel later. “That’s why the NATO membership [for Ukraine] is so important. Be clear! Clarity leads to stability leads to peace. Right? It’s over with their empire, their doctrine of the ‘Near abroad.’ They don’t have any sphere of influence any more. Right? You don’t want Poland in the Russian sphere of influence any more,” he said to the panel’s moderator, the former Polish prime minister Aleksander Kwaśniewski. “No more should Ukraine.”

Despite Johnson’s best attempt at advocacy, Trump’s policy, to the extent it could be discerned, found few takers at this conference. Kamala Harris would probably win far more votes from this crowd on general principle, but the depth of her commitment to any particular Ukraine policy remains unclear. She was represented at the conference, via video call, by Rebecca Lissner, a senior Biden official who moved to the Vice President’s staff two years ago. Lissner has solid credentials in the administration, but her remarks to the conference amounted to a summary of everything Biden and Harris have already done. How would a President Harris’s response evolve as the situation evolved? Lissner did not tip her hand, which was fair enough, bit it didn’t leave the crowd in Kyiv leaning forward.

Biden is the known quantity. He has been an asset beyond any of Zelensky’s reasonable expectation, but far short of his hopes and needs. But even now, even after the second- or third-worst summer of his life, this American President listens, learns and reconsiders.

He will need to do a lot of reconsidering, if he is ever going to green-light Ukrainian launches of Western missiles at targets inside Russia, or a Poland-led no-fly zone over Western Ukraine, or the other elements that Zelensky is likely to request. Just about every piece of kit that Biden has sent to Ukraine is something he was previously reluctant to engage. But the President’s mindset has been largely reactive, which cedes the power of initiative to Putin — or, as with the Kursk incursion, to resourceful Ukrainian battlefield commanders who would rather seek forgiveness than permission.

Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, also addressed the conference via a Zoom interview conducted by Zakaria. Sullivan’s deep familiarity with the vocabulary of this conflict, the weapons platforms, geography and the combatants’ discourse, were obvious. So was a fundamentally defensive mindset.

“I meet with my team every single day to think about what are the implements, the tools we need to put into place to help stabilize that [Donbas] front and make sure that those grinding advances by the Russians are met with stiff resistance,” Sullivan told Zakaria. And again, later: “We have tried at every stage to put Ukraine in a position to defend effectively on the battlefield.” Well, yeah, but advances that meet only “stiff resistance” tend to win. Defending effectively presumes, and to some extent constitutes resigned expectation of, attack.

But still. You deal the hand you’re dealt. The terms of Biden’s support have broadened as the conflict has deepened, and might yet broaden again. Zelensky still has time to try — “four months and a few days,” as Sullivan kept repeating, referring to the distance from here to the next Presidential inauguration. Beyond that, a gulf of uncertainty, or if Trump returns, worse.

So Zelensky readies his pitch. “Of course, it’s a strategic plan,” he told Zakaria at last. “This plan will strengthen Ukraine, our soldiers and civilians, Ukraine, our country.” He added one more “very important thing” about the plan: “Not too much points. What is also good, I think, [is] not because it’s my idea, but I think what is good [is] that there are not too much points.”

I think he was reassuring the crowd, and indeed himself, that he was not preparing to bog Joe Biden down in detail. There was nervous laughter from the crowd.

“And all the points depend on decision of Biden,” he said. Harris can be briefed on Zelensky’s proposal later, and Trump too if he wants, and Congressional leaders after that. But Biden will hear first, and decide. “I can’t give 100% [guarantee] that it will stop Putin, no. But it will make Ukraine stronger. And, I think, push Putin to think about how to finish the war.”

Photographs provided by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation ©2024 and YES2024. Photographed by PRYZM (Nicolas Lobet, Valentyna Rostovikova, Frederic Garrido-Ramirez) and Oleksandr Piliugin

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I had expected this post to contain more elements of travelogue, but I wanted to focus on the central element of drama, Zelensky’s approaching pitch to Biden. Here, as a kind of bonus, are brief notes on how I got there and what I saw.

There’s no flying these days into Kyiv or any other destination in Ukraine. Just about everyone, including Justin Trudeau when he visits, takes a rickety old sleeper train from near the Polish border town of Chelm to Kyiv, about an 11-hour trip overnight. Meals are rudimentary — I had a roasted eggplant and some mushroom ragout in a styrofoam clamshell — but the company of colleagues from all over Europe in the YES Train’s press car was pleasant.

Before the conference, Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic Monthly staff writer who is married to Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, told me Kyiv is such a normal-seeming city, so far from the front after the Russians broke their teeth on the city’s defenses in the invasion’s first days, that visitors are sometimes disappointed with how exotic it isn’t. This matched my experience, although I was in no way disappointed. The conference hotel was down the street from a Zegna shop. Kyiv today looks a lot like Warsaw in 2004. It’s missed out on some of the investment because it hasn’t enjoyed the stability, but it’s a pleasant city.

Of course there are constant echos of something darker. Conference participants were warned against sharing any details or social-media posts before or during the conference. One does not want to give the Russians ideas. Every night in Kyiv there are air-raid sirens. They are not the product of guess-work, but result from observed launches. Once you hear them, as we did while I was walking around on Friday night —

— you have a choice to make: get to one of hundreds of shelters underground, or stay groundside and take your chances. I took my cues from the pedestrians around me, most of whom can get information on the details of an alert from mobile-phone apps, and all of whom ignored this one. It was over in a few minutes, one of the shortest alarms last week.

At Maidan Square, the site of the 2013-14 pro-European demonstrations that preceded Putin’s invasion of Crimea, there is a makeshift memorial to the countless thousands of soldiers and civilians who have died in a war that has been going on for a decade, not only since 2022. Flags and photos cover the ground at one end of the ceremonial square, in spontaneous and ever-growing tribute to who’s been lost. The sea of blue and yellow now covers most of a city block. Here’s some video I recorded: