Biden walking a fine line with NATO, Ukraine
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden reached out to Ukraine’s leader Thursday as the United States moved to take a more direct role in diplomacy between that country and Russia, part of a broader effort to dissuade Russia from a destabilizing invasion of its western neighbor.
But any negotiations to peacefully resolve Europe’s tangled East-west rivalries will present minefields for the president.
Biden made his offer of American diplomacy during a twohour online session with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday. He proposed joining the Europeans in negotiations not just to settle the conflict in eastern Ukraine but to address Putin’s larger strategic objections to NATO expanding its membership and building military capacity ever closer to Russia’s borders.
Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
by phone for more than an hour Thursday. In a tweet, the Ukrainian leader said the two “discussed possible formats for resolving the conflict in Donbas and touched upon the course of internal reforms in Ukraine.”
Administration officials have suggested that the U.S. will press Ukraine to formally cede a measure
of autonomy within its eastern Donbas region, which is now under de facto control by Russiabacked separatists who rose up against Kiev in 2014. Decentralization of Ukraine and a “special status” for Donbas were laid out in a European-brokered peace deal in 2015, but it has never taken hold.
The officials made no mention of ceding any territory, and Biden has made clear that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are not on the table for the U.S.
Biden also will have to finesse Ukraine’s desire to join NATO. The U.S. and NATO reject Putin’s demands that they guarantee Ukraine won’t be admitted to the Western military alliance.
But senior State Department officials have told Ukraine that NATO membership is unlikely to be approved in the next decade, according to a person familiar with those private talks who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Since 2014, however, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and then threw its weight behind the armed separatists in the industrial Donbas region, the United States and other NATO members have been helping Ukraine build up its defenses.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan stressed at a White House briefing after Biden’s call with Putin that “there was the delivery of defensive assistance to Ukraine just very recently, and that will continue.”