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During a recent visit to Washington – the most high-level by a Russian official since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev heaped praise on Donald Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine war.
“President Trump's administration has made tremendous progress” toward peace, Dmitriev said, and moreover, has “stopped World War III from happening.”
In response, an indignant Michael McFaul, the hawkish former US ambassador to Russia, chided what he called “hyperbolic threats about World War III,” which he dismissed as “complete nonsense.”
While Dmitriev’s claim of Trump’s “tremendous progress” on peace in Ukraine may be premature, his invocation of World War III does not seem so objectionable in light of new revelations about how Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, escalated the conflict.
According to a lengthy account in the New York Times, sourced to top US, Ukrainian, and NATO officials, the US military under Biden effectively ran the Ukrainian military’s fight against Russian forces.
The US “partnership” with Ukraine, the Times’ Adam Entous reports, “was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” At a U.S. military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, US military officer planned Ukraine’s battlefield operations, selected Ukrainian targets, and fed Ukrainian soldiers the “precise targeting information” to carry out strikes. As one European intelligence chief put it, the US was “part of the kill chain.”
Under the kill chain’s modus operandi, “the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.” Yet with the US directly involved in killing Russian soldiers, a “fraught linguistic debate” emerged: “was it unduly provocative to call targets ‘targets’”? A US military commander, Maj. Gen. Timothy D. Brown, “solved” the debate:
The locations of Russian forces would be “points of interest.” Intelligence on airborne threats would be “tracks of interest.” “If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” one U.S. official explained.
With this semantic ploy, the US continued targeting Russians. And contrary to Michael McFaul’s semantic objection to the Kremlin envoy’s warning of World War III, the Biden administration harbored the same fears. To make the case for HIMARS missile systems, US General Christopher Cavoli argued that “with HIMARS, they can fight like we can, and that’s how they will start to beat the Russians.” Entous describes the ensuing deliberation in Washington:
At the White House, Mr. Biden and his advisers weighed that argument against fears that pushing the Russians would only lead Mr. Putin to panic and widen the war. When the generals requested HIMARS, one official recalled, the moment felt like “standing on that line, wondering, if you take a step forward, is World War III going to break out?”
In other words, the Biden administration took escalatory steps in its remote war against Russian forces despite being aware that they might trigger World War III. And on the escalation ladder, HIMARS were far from the only step.
Initially, to “blunt the risk of Russian retaliation against N.A.T.O. partners,” US targets were confined to areas inside Ukraine. As one senior US official explained: “Our message to the Russians was, ‘This war should be fought inside Ukraine.’” But after a Ukrainian counteroffensive faltered and the Russians continued to advance in 2024, the Biden team was “forced to keep crossing its own red lines simply to keep the Ukrainians afloat.” This includes deploying US military advisers close to the front lines, providing Ukraine with long-range ATACMs missiles, and then letting Ukraine use those ATACMs for strikes deep into Russian territory.
“The unthinkable had become real,” Entous writes. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.” And with the Kremlin undoubtedly aware that the US was crossing its own red lines to help kill Russian soldiers, the Biden administration placed all its bets on the prospect that Russian President Vladimir Putin would respond with restraint, and not carry out reciprocal action.
Entous also newly confirms that Biden’s last-minute decision to authorize ATACMs strikes into Russia was motivated by political considerations, not military reality. After “Trump won ... the fear came rushing in” at the White House, Entous writes. “In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project.”
As part of that bid to “shore up” Biden’s pet proxy war, US officials repeatedly pressured Kyiv to send younger Ukrainians off to fight. Before the Ukrainian draft age was lowered from 27 to 25, Cavoli implored his Ukrainian military chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi to “get your 18-year-olds in the game.” Driving through Kyiv, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin “was struck ... by the sight of so many men in their 20s, almost none of them in uniform.” Accordingly, in early 2025, “Austin pressed [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky to take the bigger, bolder step and begin drafting 18-year-olds.” Entous captures the ensuing exchange:
To which Mr. Zelensky shot back, according to an official who was present, “Why would I draft more people? We don’t have any equipment to give them.” “And your generals are reporting that your units are undermanned,” the official recalled Mr. Austin responding. “They don’t have enough soldiers for the equipment they have.”
That was the perennial standoff:
In the Ukrainians’ view, the Americans weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help them prevail. In the Americans’ view, the Ukrainians weren’t willing to do what was necessary to help themselves prevail.
The American account is disingenuous. As Austin, Biden, Jake Sullivan and other administration officials made clear, their aim was not to help Ukraine prevail, but to use Ukraine for a “strategic defeat” of Russia that would “weaken” its “national power,” or even force Vladimir Putin’s ouster.
An honest appraisal of Biden’s Ukraine policy was recently offered by David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist close to Biden’s inner circle and supportive of their proxy war. The war in Ukraine, Ignatius wrote, “was a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill.”
Ignatius’ assessment requires a qualification. As the Times account newly underscores, the Biden administration was “cold-blooded” not only for letting Ukraine pay the “butcher’s bill” in the form of hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was also cold-blooded toward the entire planet: from afar, running a kill chain that took the lives of many Russians, and risked World War III in the process.
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