At last Biden is taking real steps to help Ukraine – but is it too little too late?

Editorial: The US president sends a signal on his way out and although President-Elect Trump has a distaste for America’s involvement in the Ukraine war, that doesn’t mean he will bow down to Putin

What took you so long, Joe?” President Biden’s belated decision to allow Ukrainian armed forces to deploy a key US-supplied missile system deeper into Russian territory will be a welcome boost to morale in Kyiv, as well as being of some material help. It should also prompt the British and French to follow suit and to generally encourage other allies to boost their support for Ukraine.

However, it is painful to reflect on how much more effective this change in tactics would have been had the move been made, say, a year or two ago. In hindsight, President Vladimir Putin’s veiled threats about escalation proved to be empty – and now no one thinks he’s about to bomb New York, Paris or London in revenge for the West giving the Ukrainians more firepower. As it is, in the dying days of the Biden administration, it seems unlikely to be the kind of “game changer” that President Zelensky and his long-suffering people have been virtually begging from the West since the earliest days of this conflict.

It may be recalled that, when the news broke about President Putin’s “special military operation” in February 2022, the reaction in many Western capitals was to assume that nothing much could be done to save Ukraine, and even if it could, it would be unwise. The most notorious response was Germany’s initial decision to send anything more lethal than some new helmets to the Ukrainian troops. The British were honourable exceptions to the general mood of complacency (and sending military hardware was one of the few tangibly useful things Boris Johnson achieved in his entire political career).

Since then, the pattern has been depressingly similar. On the supply of defensive missile shields, artillery and munitions, then of tanks, then of advanced fighter jets, and now of the ATACMS and Storm Shadow missile systems – it has always been a case of “too little, too late”.

After the first, spectacularly incompetent Russian offensives failed in the face of brave Ukrainian resistance, the West seemed ever-reluctant to press the advantage and help them to take the fight to the enemy, and drive the invaders out. Consciously or otherwise, the West, led by America, seemed always determined to give Ukraine just enough to defend itself and not be overrun, yet too little to entirely claw back what had been lost in 2022 – let alone recover the sovereign territories across Crimea and the eastern provinces occupied in 2014, or inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Much the same might be said of the mix of sanctions and other measures pursued in recent years – only very recently have some frozen Russian assets been used to fund the defence of Ukraine.

President Biden’s move won’t get Crimea back, then, but it may well blunt Russia’s attempts to wreck the supply of energy and water to Ukraine’s towns and cities, slow the grinding Russian advances in eastern villages, and counter the 50,000 to 100,000 Russian and North Korean soldiers in the Kursk battlefields. That will help President Zelensky hang on to as much land as possible before any armistice to “freeze” the facts on the ground.

Such a moment will come after Donald Trump starts to make his own decisions – and there are some hints that he may not be as easy a pushover for Mr Putin as he has proved in the past. Mr Trump never disguised his distaste for America’s involvement in the Ukraine war, but that does not mean he wants his first foreign policy move to be seen as an abject surrender to Russia.

Despite some childishly cruel social media posts about Ukraine’s tragedy by Elon Musk and Donald Trump Junior, the next president himself hasn’t commented, adding to the suspicion that he at least knew about President Biden’s plans, and the pair may even have discussed such options at their two-hour transitional meeting.

With many of the principal players at the G20 summit, what is plain to see is that the US’s strategy of uncertain, limited military support could never prevail against the tacit military, financial and diplomatic support for Russia being offered by some leading G20 powers – China in particular, but also, albeit to a more limited degree, by the likes of India and South Africa.

Russia could also call upon the malign talents of the hard men of Tehran and Pyongyang to break sanctions and send arms, and soldiers in the case of North Korea. Only a total commitment of American military force could have had any hope of putting President Putin in his place. Soon, President Trump will have to demonstrate that he, the self-styled master of “the art of the deal”, can do any better.