Why didn’t U.S. provide aid when Biden was point man?
WASHINGTON >> Former Vice President Joe Biden has said that in holding up vital military assistance to Ukraine, President Trump “used the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that’s still under direct assault from Russia … to subvert the rule of law in the express hope of extracting a political favor.”
That’s rich. The aid in question is lethal military assistance the Obama-Biden administration refused to give Ukraine.
In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and began arming separatists in eastern Ukraine with tanks, armored vehicles and rocket launchers, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to Washington to plead for weapons to defend his country. In an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress — with Biden sitting directly behind him — Poroshenko said his country appreciated the nonlethal assistance he was getting, but declared “One cannot win a war with blankets.”
The Obama-Biden administration was unmoved. The Wall Street Journal reported then that “President Barack Obama stuck to his refusal to provide weapons or other lethal military gear to Ukraine, despite a passionate appeal Thursday for help in fighting pro-Russian rebels by Ukraine’s president.” Why? The administration feared lethal aid would provoke Moscow.
So what did the administration give him? Instead of RPGs (rocketpropelled grenades), we provided MREs (meals ready to eat) — food rations. As one frustrated former Pentagon official put it at the time, “What kind of message does that send anyway? We are sending MREs while they are being invaded by an aggressor.”
Answer: a message of weakness. When Trump took office, he delivered a message of strength. In December 2017, the new administration announced that the U.S. would send the lethal aid to Ukraine Poroshenko requested and Obama and Biden refused — the sale of $47 million worth of Javelin antitank missiles. In May 2018, after Ukraine tested its new Javelin missiles, Poroshenko exulted on Twitter, “Finally this day has come!” and personally thanked Trump “for supporting Ukraine and adopting a decision to provide Javelin antitank missile systems.”
For Biden to now attack Trump for a temporary delay in a new round of lethal military aid reeks of hypocrisy. It was on Biden’s watch that the United States refused to deliver military aid at all. Yet the same vice president who sat there impassively while Ukraine’s president begged for weapons now dares to cite the Russian threat to Ukraine in castigating Trump? Talk about chutzpah.
And since Biden raised the Russian threat, let’s recall that the Obama-Biden administration bears much responsibility for the annexation of Crimea that necessitated the delivery of lethal aid to Ukraine in the first place. Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine came in the aftermath of the Obama-Biden administration’s failure to enforce its red line against Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons by Syria.
Assad responded by using chemical weapons on innocent civilians not once, but 16 times. And yet Obama and Biden did nothing, failing to carry out even “unbelievably small” military strikes — a decision Biden publicly defended. “We can easily say we should have bombed and gone in and taken out their air defense system,” Biden said. “Well, you know, big nations can’t bluff.”
But Obama and Biden did — and Assad called their bluff.
None of this excuses Trump’s delaying a new round of lethal military aid to Ukraine. But if this military assistance was as vital to countering the Russian threat as Biden says, then why didn’t the United States provide it when Biden was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine?