Keith Gessen
In the summer of 2023, while the second Ukrainian counter-offensive was still under way, I spoke to Alexander Bick, a Biden Administration official who had helped lead planning at the National Security Council on the eve of the Russian invasion. When we talked, American strategy in Ukraine was looking very good. In the run-up to the war, the U.S. had convinced skeptical Europeans that American intelligence about an imminent Russian invasion was legitimate, rallied the Europeans to mount a united response, creatively made intelligence available to prepare the American public for the coming fight, and eventually persuaded the Ukrainians themselves that Vladimir Putin wasn’t bluffing. U.S. intelligence knew Russian battlefield plans in advance and shared them with the Ukrainian military; the Americans rushed highly effective antitank weapons into the country and helped Ukrainian officials think through a robust defense of Kyiv. On top of that, American strategists got lucky. “We got one thing exactly right—what the Russians were going to do, when they were going to do it, and where they were going to do it,” Bick said. “We got everything else wrong”—Russian capabilities, Ukrainian capabilities, the European response. “We just happened to get them all wrong in our favor.”
Bick and I were speaking at an optimistic moment. The Ukrainian counter-offensive had not yet failed; Russia had not yet reconstituted its mutilated armed forces; and the memory of the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed rebellion was still fresh. Donald Trump was a former President fighting off criminal charges in numerous jurisdictions. Bick did not sense that Putin was open to genuine negotiations on ending the war. But, just as important, Bick and the Administration were in no particular hurry to get him there. They believed that time was on the side of Ukraine and its allies. The American Presidential election seemed far away, and Ukraine a peripheral issue to it.
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