Feb 4, 2015
On Military Aid to Ukraine, the Administration Zig-Zags
In his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Ash Carter, the administration’s nominee for defense secretary, said that he is “very much inclined” to send arms to Ukraine. One hopes that this is not another piece of the administration’s one-step-forward, one-step-backward rhetorical pattern regarding the Ukrainian government’s months-old requests for lethal military assistance from the United States.
Consider: When asked during his confirmation hearing in November about providing such assistance to Ukraine, Deputy Secretary of State-nominee Tony Blinken responded: “That’s something we should be looking at.” News reports that followed Mr. Blinken’s comments suggested that the Obama administration was rethinking its refusal to provide the military help Kiev has requested.
In Congress, there is strong bipartisan support for providing military aid; see, for instance, the Ukraine Freedom Support Act passed in December. The president, however, has rejected such entreaties–and the White House has not moved on its opposition.
A front-page story in the New York Times this week was headlined “U.S. Considers Supplying Arms to Kiev Forces.” It was no coincidence that this deflected attention from an important think-tank report issued the same day by eight former senior officials, most from Democratic administrations, calling for providing such assistance to Ukraine.
But the day before the Times story was published, the person responsible for refusing to provide lethal assistance to Ukraine, President Barack Obama, said during an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that “there are clear limits in terms of what we would do militarily.” He went on: “To those who would suggest that we need to do more … we can exact higher and higher costs … and we can bring diplomatic pressure to bear. I don’t think that it would be wise for the United States or the world to see a actual military conflict between the United States and Russia.”
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said in an interview with CNN the next day: “We still think that the best way to influence Russia’s calculus is through those economic sanctions that are biting deep into the Russian economy. … We are not going to bring the Ukrainian military into parity with Russia’s military, certainly not in the near future.”
Mr. Rhodes added that the White House is “constantly looking at” whether to offer Kiev additional military equipment.
Yet White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Tuesday that “providing additional military assistance could and is likely to have the effect of increasing the bloodshed.” One could get whiplash from such contradictory comments. Amid the conflicting statements, one thing is clear: Unless and until Mr. Obama says it himself, there is little point in believing that the administration is serious about helping Ukraine defend itself militarily against Russian aggression.
David J. Kramer is senior director for human rights and democracy at the McCain Institute in Washington.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/02/04/on-military-aid-to-ukraine-the-administration-zig-zags/
