Does America want Ukraine to defeat Russia? It doesn’t look that way.

KYIV, Ukraine — Will Joe or won’t he?

Once again, Ukrainian wartime leaders are preoccupied with a looming choice across the ocean in Washington that will shape their fate as much as anything that happens on the front lines.

In my conversations with them here in recent days, they expressed a mix of concern, exhaustion and determination. The spring and summer fighting seasons brought successes — a stunning incursion into Russia and technological advances in drone and robotic warfare that blunted their enemy’s advantages in manpower and weapons. But the human cost for Ukraine is huge — pictures of those killed in action hang across Kyiv. Russia is stepping up bombing attacks, including on this capital and energy infrastructure, with worries growing that this winter may be the hardest ever.

All that puts a great weight of expectations on Washington. In the coming weeks, President Joe Biden must decide whether to allow the Ukrainian military to use the U.S.-provided long-range missiles to strike deeper in Russia. This is just the latest in a series of decisions about the extent of American support for Ukraine. But it is also potentially a pivot in America’s approach to this conflict.

The Ukrainians are asking the American president to expand the target list to include sites beyond the immediate border area in Russia that America has allowed them to strike. It is a fair ask. Russians are waging war on Ukraine from their territory, sending bombers and missiles, and Kyiv wants to use the weapons it has to defend itself.

Is it an escalation? No more so than when Ukraine asked for advanced American Abrams tanks, F-16s or the surface-to-surface Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMs) from the U.S. It’s more about giving the Ukrainians the ability to wage war as well as they can with the weapons they have. As the Russian leader has done every time the U.S. was considering these requests, Vladimir Putin made threatening noises, warning last week that Ukrainian ATACM strikes on Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.” Every other time, nothing changed when Biden, almost always after protracted stewing, signed off on one or another allegedly escalatory step.

Biden is channeling Hamlet more than usual. Because this time is different for other reasons. The election is 47 days away. The strategic consequences feel bigger, too. With four months left in his term, like any lame duck, Biden must have his legacy front of mind.

At the gathering of Ukrainian leaders and U.S. and European policymakers, called the Yalta European Strategy, over the weekend, Ukrainian leaders pushed the military and moral argument. We, they said, have to defend ourselves against a Russian escalation of drone and missile attacks launched from across the border. Also, it’s always good to make the Kremlin worry more about what else Ukraine will — and can — do to bring the war to Russia. Ukraine used Western-supplied missiles to push back Russian forces from Crimea, the Ukrainian region annexed by Russia where Kyiv isn’t prevented from using them. Ukraine already strikes deep in Russia with drones and is developing its own missiles.

Ukrainians had hoped Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited earlier last week, would resolve the issue. Instead, he promised to take it back for Biden to study further. They also hoped Biden would use his meeting with visiting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer a couple days later to loosen rules. Nope. Now they are looking ahead to next week’s U.N. General Assembly gathering in New York when Biden and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet.

With tact, Sergii Leshchenko, who advises the Zelenskyy administration, told me over dinner that the Ukrainians are “immensely grateful for the American support and just a little frustrated” by the delays.

To their credit, they are hiding their frustration better than in the past. Speaking at YES, Zelenskyy said of his proposed expansion into Russia, “We’re working on it.” You didn’t have to read far in between the lines to understand the Ukrainian frame of mind.

“Putin treats the delays as permission to do what he wants,” Zelenskyy said. “We have to make it more difficult for him. It’s too easy.”

Zelenskyy will bring “a four-point plan” to end the war to his meeting with Biden next week. He shared details with Blinken in private but provided none at his appearance. The Ukrainians have talked about peace for months and tried negotiations early in the war. It’s almost impossible to imagine that Putin would agree, at this moment, to anything that Ukraine could accept. The Ukrainians want to show they are open to talk — even as they push for this fresh advantage on the battlefield.

The Biden administration’s fear of escalation used to center around Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Though former President Donald Trump mentioned Putin’s nukes at the presidential debate last Tuesday, that’s not as big a concern now. Russia’s patron China told Putin to keep that saber unrattled. Putin also knows that kind of escalation could well be his own end.

These days, the fear is that Russia can cause America a lot of pain in the Middle East by arming foes like the Houthis to strike U.S. troops and interests. Well, what exactly stopped them from doing that now? In the wake of its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has claimed to be at war not with Ukraine — which to the Kremlin is not even a legitimate nation — but with the entire West.

“The arguments about escalation are very 2014,” noted Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, more dryly than bitterly. A decade ago, Putin put his special forces disguised as “little green men” — soldiers dressed in unmarked military fatigues — in Crimea and ordered his proxies into the Donbas. Then-President Barack Obama sent Kyiv blankets and MREs and refused to provide any weapons while Germany went forward with a huge gas pipeline deal with Russia. Putin saw the timid Western response and annexed Crimea and tried to push deeper into Ukraine. The full invasion came eight years later and has stretched Russia badly. Now, Budanov continued, “we have a standard conventional war with all kinds of conventional weapons used. How can Putin help [in the Middle East]? Everything they have in Russia is delivered here. In a global sense they can’t do anything as long as this war rages.”

Another senior Ukrainian official, granted anonymity, added that “We have crossed all these red lines, and [the Russians] are weaker than ever.” You can discount for some spin about Russian weakness without diluting the point that the ramping up of military support despite Putin’s bluster has enabled Ukraine to significantly diminish the Russian military — in ways that benefit American and European security interests.

The worrying battlefield outlook gives the push urgency. Ukraine last month took the Kremlin by surprise to occupy 400 square miles of Russian territory near Kursk, and with drones smashed up a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. But the Ukrainians are ceding ground in the eastern Donbas region and fighting off massive drone and missile attacks on their largest cities. They need a morale and momentum shift. Lowering the restrictions on missile use could help.

Beside the usual concerns in this White House about escalation versus the state of Ukraine’s war effort that have led to past delays to shore up American support, some other important things should be weighing on Biden.

For sure the immediate political stakes are bigger. Trump ran against American wars in 2016. He couldn’t this time but has blamed Biden for failing to prevent the conflict in Ukraine and promised if he wins to end it before Inauguration Day (legal prohibitions on doing that, notwithstanding). Could Putin escalate to try to help Trump defeat Kamala Harris? Is that a risk Biden would take? Biden could wait until after Election Day to give the green light to attacks on Russia and keep it clear of American politics. But it’s not as if Putin needs an excuse to push disinformation or create trouble in the Middle East or Europe — or for that matter in our politics.

One possible fudge would be for the U.S. to insist on approval for all targeting and explicitly exclude oil refineries and other sensitive targets, including perhaps Moscow.

This is the small stuff. The missile call could finally answer the big question the Biden team has ducked from the start of the conflict. What does victory for Ukraine look like? Do we even want that? After all, that would, as Britain’s former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said with his usual glee here, mean that Putin loses.

Biden and his team avoid the v-word. At the start of the war, Biden pledged American support for Ukraine “as long as it takes” and mobilized the U.S. and allies to provide billions in arms and economic aid. As long as it takes to accomplish what ultimate goal? What “victory” in Ukraine would look like was never explicitly stated. “Not losing” was the closest translation. At the same time, Biden ruled out certain tactics that could have been left ambiguous and kept Putin guessing — like his early pledge that no American in uniform would set foot on Ukrainian soil to aid directly the war effort.

The message to Russia was that the NATO allies would help Ukraine, but never far enough to truly upset the status quo in Russia itself. Victory defined as a Ukraine independent and secure in its borders implies you’d need to change a Russia that’s bent on recreating its old empire. This is the kind of victory Washington hasn’t committed to.

“They don’t want Ukraine to lose and they don’t want Russia to lose. That position is irreconcilable,” Eerik Kross, an Estonian parliamentarian and former intelligence officer, told me on the sidelines of YES.

There is precedent here. Many of the most important Ukrainian officials were children when the Soviet Union collapsed. An older generation though remembers the day in August 1991 when President George H.W. Bush stopped by Kyiv — then known only as Kiev, by its Russian transliteration — en route to Moscow. Speaking before the Soviet Ukrainian parliament, Bush urged Ukrainians not to seek independence from Russia. Resist “suicidal nationalism,” he chided.

To Ukrainians, America’s president made it dispiritingly clear that he feared the uncertainty of Russia’s collapse more than he wanted to stand by values like democracy and self determination for a long repressed colonial outpost of Moscow. A few weeks later, over 90 percent of Ukrainians backed independence in a referendum. By the end of the year the Soviet Union was dead and an independent Ukraine was born. Bush’s appearance went down in history as the “Chicken Kiev speech.” It was ill-timed, weak-willed — and kind of cowardly.

What the U.S. does in Ukraine reverberates around the world. Allies and foes are watching closely. The Biden record on supporting its friends is mixed. Less than a year into his term, he pulled the U.S. out of Afghanistan, leaving behind some tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the Americans, $300 billion in U.S. military kit, a bilateral security treaty in tatters, and American standing and deterrence weakened. Whatever you think about the merits of the war there, America abandoned its allies in Afghanistan — and Biden’s presidency never recovered. The downward turn in his approval ratings dates back to September of 2021.

The Ukrainians and their friends are dropping loud hints that Biden has a chance to reshape his legacy in his last four months. Put the caution aside and put the U.S. firmly behind victory for Ukraine by giving them all the tools they need to win — not merely not to lose, or as they say fatalistically here in the third year of a war of attrition, “die a slow death.”

If not, Biden will have a Chicken Kiev sequel to finish out his presidency. His choice.