Biden’s now ready to arm Ukraine to the hilt. Germany and France must pull their weight too
President Joe Biden spent just short of an hour on the phone from the Oval Office with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday to tell him about America’s new $800million package of military aid for his beleaguered but defiant country.
it included some of the more sophisticated, heavy-duty weaponry Ukraine has been demanding from the West but until now has been largely denied, such as 18 howitzer cannons — armoured, mobile and with a 20-mile range.
so the U.s. president knew Zelensky would be pleased.
But the Ukrainian leader’s reaction was to complain it didn’t include the helicopters on his officials’ wish-list in previous talks with Biden’s hawkish national security Advisor, Jake sullivan, and his top military man, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff.
the U.s. President immediately added 11 Mi-17s, soviet-era helicopters still widely used as troop carriers and gunships by militaries across the globe, which Ukrainian pilots know how to fly.
it all amounts to a significant stepchange in U.s. military aid to Ukraine.
On a trip to America this week i spoke to several sources privy to Biden’s latest thinking. they all agreed that, in the wake of russian atrocities in Bucha and many other places in Ukraine, Biden had decided that he could never make peace with president Putin — that he really did see him as a war criminal engaged in genocide — and that russia had to be treated as an international pariah until he was gone from power.
thus has the man who once mused that a ‘minor incursion’ by russia into Ukraine might be acceptable, who has dithered at times over how to respond to Putin’s unprovoked invasion and made several embarrassing gaffes along the way, become the U.s. President prepared to arm Ukraine to the hilt.
‘the Ukraine crisis has been tough for a man of Joe Biden’s years,’ a source tells me. ‘He’s struggled to cope at times, he’s often expressed himself badly. But he is fundamentally a decent man who knows evil when he sees it.
‘He regards Putin as beyond the pale. He will not deal with russia as long as Putin is in the Kremlin.’
even before this latest package, the scale of U.s. military aid to Ukraine has been substantial — and decisive in helping the country slow down, stop and sometimes even repel the invaders.
THe $800 million (£612 million) comes on top of $2.4 billion (£1.8 billion) already sanctioned and largely delivered. every day, U.s. cargo carriers land close to the Ukraine border packed with weapons and other military hardware, which then travels by ground convoy into Ukraine.
the new weaponry is not coming a moment too soon. Putin has given up on taking the capital, Kyiv. indeed, it looks like he accepts that a wholesale occupation is now impossible. But he is reconstituting and redeploying his forces to the russian-speaking donbas region in eastern Ukraine, part of which russia has effectively occupied for eight years.
He is attempting to establish a land corridor along Ukraine’s south-east coast from Crimea, which he seized in 2014, and donbas. it is from the east that he now aims to mount a war of attrition against the rest of Ukraine.
U.s. intelligence sources accept Putin is digging in for the long haul. He calculates that even if the Ukrainian military can hold him to a stalemate, in a prolonged standoff, the West will lose interest.
Ukraine will slide down the agenda, divisions among the allies will emerge and can be exploited.
And there is cause for concern. Biden’s leadership over Ukraine is winning him no domestic dividend. His latest approval rating has slumped to 33 per cent.
His democratic Party faces big losses in the House of representatives in the mid-term elections this november and i think it could even lose the senate.
democrats are increasingly divided between a gerontocratic leadership (think Biden, elizabeth Warren, Bernie sanders, Hillary Clinton) and a new generation of Corbynistas more interested in grandstanding on social media than serious foreign policy.
if the democrats lose Congress, recriminations will be bitter.
nor does Biden have an obvious successor, should he decide not to run again. Vice President Kamala Harris, picked to be a shoo-in, is even more unpopular than Biden, her grip on global affairs not even tenuous.
in the wake of Boris Johnson’s surprise visit to Kyiv, greeted with global acclaim, the Biden administration wants its own day in the Ukrainian spring sun. Biden, so far, is ruled out for being too frail. nobody, so far, is suggesting that Harris should take his place.
As for republicans, russia’s barbarity in Ukraine has silenced most of the eccentric Putin-lovers on its ‘nut job’ fringe. But its most famous Putin fanboy of all, donald trump, still looms over the party, stymieing all attempts to move on from the trump years.
it is still widely accepted that the republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election is his for the asking. it is a sign of the sparse democratic gene pool that increasingly it’s being said that only Biden could stop him returning to the White House.
in almost half a century of covering American politics, i can’t remember both democrats and republicans being in worse shape. But America’s allies have their problems, too.
Britain is solid for the Biden approach, but the Johnson government is once again mired in ‘Partygate’ scandals which continue to obsess the political and media chattering classes and which Putin will conclude is just another example of Western decadence and democratic politics’ lack of serious purpose.
Germany is still a depressing drag on a proper embargo of russian oil and gas and its leader, Olaf scholz, has even resisted sending Ukraine the heavy armour it promised.
France is consumed with a presidential election in which the incumbent, emmanuel Macron, recently described nato as ‘braindead’ and tried to cosy up to Putin even after the invasion, while the challenger, Marine Le Pen, wants to take France out of nato, regards russia as an ally and still refuses to condemn its atrocities in Ukraine.
Putin hopes that a confluence of events weakens Western resolve over time. You couldn’t rule it out. the allies have more than their fair share of flaky, fairweather politicians. But i think there are good grounds for hope that Putin’s new strategy in the east will fail just as badly as it did around Kyiv.
For a start, redeploying his forces eastwards is not without its problems. some russian troops have lost their stomach for the fight. there is a shortage of fresh manpower. increasing reliance on soldiers from Chechnya and russia’s far east is turning Putin’s forces into something of a colonial army.
replacing equipment is an even bigger struggle than finding more troops. Ukraine has destroyed more russian armour than some european countries possess.
Western intelligence reckons Putin will be able to field no more than 65,000 operational and well-equipped men, which is nothing near enough to break out from the east and take more of Ukraine. indeed, it might not even be enough to hold on to what they’ve got.
in addition to howitzers and helicopters, the new weaponry flooding into Ukraine includes, from America, 300 deadly switchblade drones (on top of the 100 already sent) and radar systems that track incoming missiles and pinpoint their origin; s-300 anti-aircraft missiles from slovakia; t-72 tanks from the Czech republic; and 120 armoured vehicles from the UK.
CrUCiALLY, the russians don’t have control of the skies and the loss of the russian navy’s Black sea flagship, Moskva, makes that even less likely in the crucial southeastern theatre.
the symbolic sinking of a battleship called ‘Moscow’ by Ukrainian cruise missiles is obviously massive — not just the biggest russian naval loss since World War ii but the biggest warship of any navy to go down since 1945 (yes, bigger than the Belgrano).
But the military significance is even greater. Moskva carried 64 s-300 missiles, every one a threat to Ukrainian aircraft in the south-east.
not only has that threat now gone, the Ukrainian air force is now free to swarm all over the south coast battlefields. even the western flank of Crimea is wide open to attack.
so Putin’s eastern prospects are far from rosy. in a war of attrition in which the russian side is increasingly short of men and material while the Ukraine side is increasingly armed with the latest and most sophisticated weapons, i know which side i’d bet on.
it doesn’t mean Ukraine can take back all the land it’s lost in the east, but it’s possible it could retake some — and russian prospects of using the east as a redoubt from which to make further gains look fanciful.
But the West will need to hold its nerve, to tighten sanctions further and to keep the weapons coming for as long as it takes if Putin is to be thwarted in the east as he was in the west. Given the courage and fighting spirit of the Ukrainians, it is surely not too much to ask of us.
‘Biden has often expressed himself badly but he is a decent man who knows evil when he sees it’
AS children, we like to indulge in crazy fantasies — that we’ll end up as film stars, astronauts, rugby professionals or maybe music moguls. For Sam Waleycohen, as he rode his wooden rocking horse, furiously bobbing and kicking, it was all about winning the Grand national.
‘it’s like saying i’d like to win Wimbledon or play at Twickenham,’ he says. ‘You imagine it, you dream of it. But it’s not a real thing.’ Until, 35 years later, it suddenly is. Because against all the odds, and in his final steeplechase before retiring, Sam won the 174th Grand national last Saturday on sevenyear-old, 50-to-one noble Yeats.
it would be a career-defining moment for any jockey. But Sam is an amateur — the first to win the brutal four-mile, two-and-a-half furlong race for 32 years — who was on a horse owned by his father and only bought in February. Sam was urged on by family and friends, including the duke and duchess of cambridge, but most of all, by the ghost of his late brother, Thomas, who died of cancer when he was just 20 and whose initials he has stitched into his saddle.
‘it was a fantasy, a fairy tale! The joy, the love. even before the race, a lot of people said, “Thomas will be riding with you”. And it really did feel like he was at my back, urging me on. i feel his presence. i always have,’ he says simply.
‘The spirit of someone lives on — it’s their legacy. it helps you keep balanced when things aren’t going right and helps you use whatever talent you have, grab opportunities and make the most out of life. That’s the legacy of Thomas.’
To be fair, Sam does seem to have more opportunities (and talents) than most.
his father, robert, the son of a baronet, founded the company Alliance Medical in 1989, which he sold for £600 million in 2007, and his mother is the daughter of Viscount Bearsted.
The family split their time between Oxfordshire and london. Growing up, he, his two brothers and sister were enviably close.
even so, Sam couldn’t have squeezed much more out of life.
he’s been piloting helicopters since he was 21 years old, and planes since he was 18. he’s bungeejumped out of a hot air balloon (‘i wasn’t really calculating the risks on that one’), summitted mountains all over the world, including Mont Blanc — which he climbed with skis on his back, for a rather speedier descent — and run marathons on the Great Wall of china and in london, roped to 35 others.
he has also raised vast sums for the Oxford hospital that treated his brother — including organising a roller disco attended by Kate Middleton in hot pants — and has long been credited as the person who got her and Wills to see sense during their brief separation back in 2007, though he’s characteristically modest about it today.
‘i think the right question is, does anybody put anybody back together?’ he says. ‘i think they do it themselves. it’s not like you can force it.’
On TOp of all that, he runs the £300 million portman dental care, which has 4,000 staff in five countries, serving more than 700,000 patients — ‘it was very stressful in lockdown. everything was shut!’ One patient he’s obliged to attend to now is his stable lad Mick Molloy — he promised to fix Mick’s gap-toothed smile with an implant if he won.
his latest victory means that Sam has become the most successful amateur jockey of his generation — adding the Grand national to his previous wins in the 2011 cheltenham Gold cup and King George Vi chase at Kempton and seven wins around the gruelling Aintree course.
To give an idea of the scale of this achievement, you could count on one hand the number of professional jockeys who’d expect to win all three of those landmark races in their careers. professional jockeys, that is, who ride every day for a living, out on the gallops, training and competing in endless races each week. Sam does it rather differently. he’s invariably woken by one of his three children ramming their cold feet into his back in the early hours. Then he spends the day dashing about his ever-expanding dental empire, attending Zoom meetings in his car before and after races (often with a smart shirt over his father’s distinctive chocolate and orange silks).
he keeps fit (and down to just ten stone five) by running, playing tennis, skiing, boxing and working out a couple of times a week on his ‘equicizer’, a robotic training horse, ‘just to keep the legs strong’ — all rammed around the day job. ‘i try not to do anything half-cock.
i’ve never wanted to play at it. i try to give it my all and my diary is always jammed,’ he says cheerily.
he’s been riding for as long as he can remember. At first it was pony club, then point-to-points, but soon he was moving his way up to racehorses, always owned by his father.
‘it’s never really been about the glory. it’s the enjoyment, the love of being on a horse, coming together with a partner, doing something you love.’
But by the time he was in his 20s, it was grief that pushed Sam onwards.
Thomas, two years younger, was diagnosed in 1995 with the rare bone cancer ewing’s sarcoma. it was a terrible blow, but it seemed treatable, at a cost — his left leg was amputated below the knee. not that it held him back.
not at the dragon School in Oxford, where he’d limp over to the cricket nets to give the sports teacher his extremely good racing tips. Or at Marlborough college, which he attended with Kate Middleton — it was through the Thomas connection that Kate (and Wills) and Sam became pals while he was at edinburgh and they were at St Andrews. (They were among the first to congratulate him on Saturday with a message from their official Twitter account).
‘he had incredible get up and go,’ says Sam. ‘And he was extremely cheeky and lovable, and because of his illness teachers found it very hard to tell him off, so he got away with a lot.’
including endless practical jokes using his prosthetic leg.
‘his favourite game was to leave his leg lying around on the hockey pitch or, when he was skiing, lie in the snow and pull his leg off to scare people,’ says Sam. ‘he just took the view that this was what he had in life, so he made the most of it.
It was a victory worthy of a movie – the amateur who won Britain’s most gruelling race, driven by family tragedy and cheered on by the royals
And he never, ever complained.’ When the cancer came back again in Thomas’s late teens, the family was under no illusion. ‘It was his third bout. We all knew he was likely to die, but it was the elephant in the room — we never talked about it,’ says Sam. ‘We knew, but we didn’t believe. You always hope that there’s something. And he kept fighting.’ Thomas died in 2004. And the family, previously so close, fell a bit adrift.
‘Initially, we all dealt with it in our own way. It was obvious when we were together that something was missing and there was an undercurrent of deep, deep sadness. It was a very dark time.’
But the following year, Sam had his first big winner, on Libertine, at the 2005 Cheltenham Festival. ‘Everything changed. It bought us all back together. There was light. Racing days are always family days now,’ he says.
Ever since, he has ridden with Thomas’ initials stitched into his saddle — to victory in the 2011 Cheltenham Gold Cup on another of his father’s horses, Long Run, beating Kauto Star and becoming the first amateur to win the race for 30 years, several more Cheltenham Festival victories and the King George VI Chase at Kempton aboard Long Run.
After years of hard work, he has also won the acceptance of professional jockeys. It was telling that, after his victory on Saturday, fellow jockey Davy Russell came and loosened Noble Yeats’s girth and another jockey rushed over to pour water to help cool him off.
All of which makes it sounds like a fairy tale. But for every victory there were endless rainy disappointments, cracked ribs, sprains and gruelling training sessions.
It was only in 2005, when he was decreed sufficiently experienced to tackle the demanding Aintree course, that a Grand National win even became a possibility.
Even then, the risks are palpable. ‘With this race, there is a big spread of outcomes. It could be the happiest day of my life, or I could end up in the local hospital,’ he says.
RIGhT now, it’s all so overwhelming because it’s been years and years of trying, and years and years of failing,’ he says. ‘Mostly, it doesn’t go to plan. Until now.’
Goodness only knows how he juggles it all. Or how his wife, Bella, copes. Did she have any idea how relentlessly dynamic he was when they met 14 years ago?
‘We’re a great team!’ he says. ‘We met at the races and she understood about my racing commitments. But work is also a big commitment, too!’
So now he’s finally hung up his boots, on the eve of his 40th birthday, will Bella be high-fiving and heel-clicking that it’s all over, or dreading whatever mad challenge is coming up on the rails?
‘Definitely, thinking “oh-oh, what’s next!”’ he laughs. ‘I’m not sure what, but I’m sure it will find me. I’ll have to keep busy, or I’ll annoy her too much.’
And probably go a bit mad himself. Because happily, while he finds it impossible to properly give in to a holiday and flop about on a sun lounger — ‘I just can’t’ — it seems that hurling himself over enormous brushwood fences at 40mph somehow helps him relax.
‘For me, riding is freedom — you have no phone, you’re concentrating, it’s escapism,’ he says. ‘And racing is like meditation. You really have to concentrate. Your range of focus is very, very narrow. I didn’t even hear the crowd on Saturday and there were 70,000 people shouting. I didn’t hear anything.’
Even so, the race didn’t get off to the start Sam was hoping for. ‘I had a load of sand kicked in my face and the horse was going backwards. Within 50 yards of the start I was thinking: “It’s over before it’s started. What a way to finish your career”.’
But then something — or perhaps the ghost of someone — kicked in. Sam certainly thinks so.
‘The horse raised his game to the highest level, and it was one of the best races I’ve ever ridden,’ he says. ‘But there was certainly a helping hand that bought it all together.’