Biden Wants to Have It Both Ways on Ukraine

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 06, 2023

 

According to NBC News reporter Josh Lederman, an unofficial American peace delegation met in April with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in New York to discuss potential terms for a ceasefire in Ukraine.

 

The delegation that met with one of Vladimir Putin’s highest-ranking deputies included outgoing Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, CFR fellow and Georgetown University professor Charles Kupchan, and CFR fellow and Kissinger Associates managing director Thomas Graham. Lederman’s sources said the goals of this back channel to Moscow were to establish “where there might be room for future negotiation, compromise, and diplomacy over ending the war.”

 

The discussions have taken place with the knowledge of the Biden administration, but not at its direction, with the former officials involved in the Lavrov meeting briefing the White House National Security Council afterward about what transpired, two of the sources said.

 

As Lederman’s reporting suggests, there isn’t much that is remarkable about the existence of “two-track” diplomatic channels with the Russian government. But the feelers the United States apparently put out this spring in relation to Moscow’s war of territorial expansion in Ukraine are unique and undermine the president’s public comments about this conflict.

 

“I’ve been very clear that we’re going to continue to provide the capability for the Ukrainian people to defend themselves — and we are not going to engage in any negotiation,” the president said at a late 2022 G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. “There’s nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Presumably, Washington would deign to inform Kyiv of the terms Moscow has set for its surrender, but that betrays the spirit of Biden’s comments.

 

Indeed, the president has branded Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctions Lavrov directly for his role in “Russia’s unprovoked and unlawful further invasion of Ukraine.” The resolve that U.S. expressions of support for Ukrainian sovereignty are meant to convey are compromised by these deniable overtures to Moscow, which were never going to produce anything fruitful. The terms on which Russia would accept peace are not unknowable, and they are unacceptable to the West — to say nothing of Kyiv.

 

So, what was the impetus for this meetup? “The approaching U.S. presidential election has raised the urgency around the war’s endgame amid concerns Republicans will reduce support for Ukraine,” Lederman reported. Okay, so the Biden administration felt compelled to suss out what Russia could plausibly call victory in its war in Ukraine only for fear that Republicans might engineer a victory for Russia in its war in Ukraine? Grubby domestic political calculations almost certainly played a role in the dispatch of this highly academic (in every sense of the word) diplomatic mission, but Republicans had little to do with it.