It was classic Biden: He inserted himself into a complex dispute half a world away, convinced that his long experience in diplomacy and personal touch could make a difference. Like a hostage negotiator, Biden was trying to build a rapport with Yanukovich even as he tried to talk him down, to convince him to take a deal that the European Union — along with the Russians — had brokered to guarantee elections by the end of 2014 and end the crisis. Under that plan, Yanukovich would have stayed in power in the interim..
For President Obama, the urgent question was how to respond to Russia’s move into Crimea. It was a clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Biden and Victoria “Toria” Nuland, the Russia hawk who was serving as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, were pressing him to act. Biden himself was eager to make Moscow “ pay in blood and money,” as my colleagues Glenn Thrush and Ken Vogel later reported.
Obama resisted the effort. Don’t get me into a war with Russia, he warned his aides repeatedly. That, first and foremost, was his goal. Such a war would not only be a new conflict with potentially unimaginable consequences for the United States — it’s a different calculus taking on a nuclear – armed state — it would, Obama believed, believed, become a fundamentally losing battle. Obama told his aides that Russia would always care more about the Ukrainians than Americans would. Intervention, in Obama’s view, would have been a violation of the guiding principle of foreign policy that he once boiled down for reporters on Air Force One into one pithy phrase: “Don’t do stupid shit.”
The fate of Crimea, Obama determined, was important but hardly a core U.S. security interest. In public, he sought to downplay both the geopolitical significance and the impact that U.S. involvement would have. “ The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non – NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he later said.
In Belgium, less than a week after the annexation, Obama had already made up his mind. “ This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” he said. “Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.”
…IN THE END, Washington’s response to the Russian incursion into Crimea was typically tepid. Obama spun out a handful of executive orders sanctioning individuals and organizations for their roles in Ukrainian corruption or the Russian annexation. The U.S. military conducted exercises with European allies and shored up its presence on the continent. There was nothing that would ruin Putin’s day.
Mild as the American moves seemed, the Europeans did even less. What they were mostly interested in, they were quick to emphasize, was the opportunity to stabilize the situation and allow cooler heads to prevail…
For much of his political career, Joe Biden had played the role of the hard – liner when it came to Russia. He had pushed for NATO expansion, despite Putin’s protests. So it wasn’t a surprise when he sided with the relatively small group of Obama aides seeking a harder line and real weapons for the Ukrainians. At the same time, he was careful not to be caught publicly disagreeing with Obama, recalled Toria Nuland.
Biden used his weekly lunches with Obama to press for the kind of lethal aid that might make a difference in the war for the Donbas. “Biden was the pit bull for defensive weapons,” Nuland told me. “He especially wanted Javelins sent,” she said, referring to the powerful American anti – tank missiles that Obama declined to ship, for fear they would be provocative…
Part of this drive stemmed from the deep ties Biden had built with people in the region, stretching back decades. It was why he led the American support for anticorruption reforms in Ukraine — including his support, now infamous, in accordance with established U.S. policy at the time, for firing the corrupt chief Ukrainian prosecutor.
What tainted Biden’s initiative were the activities of his troubled younger son, Hunter Biden, a lawyer and lobbyist with a long record of addiction problems and poor judgment. Hunter appeared to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars — starting in 2014 — to sit on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that was also under investigation for corruption. But when Obama aides broached the potential conflict of interest with Biden during their first presidential campaign, he lit into them — the blind spot Biden has often had when issues touch his family — and told them to back off. Biden maintained that his son was an independent adult and that there was no crossover between their work.
Later, Biden’s aides would cite his early work in Ukraine to make the case that he was always a Russia hawk — and that his support for Kyiv was the product of years of scar tissue as he tried to aid a country that often undercut its own interests.
