Biden is managing Ukraine's escalation. Putin's not so much.

"Managing escalation" in Ukraine is a nebulous term used by the Biden Administration since 2022. If it means "attracting additional nuclear belligerents" then the policy has been wildly successful.

Biden’s strategy of managing escalation should be renamed accelerating escalation. North Korea is arguably the third nuclear power to attack Ukraine.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Rome earlier this week that he was unsure about what thousands of North Korean soldiers were doing in Russia.

“What exactly they are doing? Left to be seen.” Austin said, inspiring the sort of confidence among Ukrainians that has become the hallmark of President Biden’s policy of managed escalation.

After all, it could be anything. Fall colors in Moscow are a sight to be seen, and even a country that has been deeply sanctioned for years still has better restaurants than Pyongyang.

Or maybe enterprising medical clinics in Kursk saw the below news story and are offering a military discount for deworming North Korean soldiers.

While I don’t have access to the volume of information Austin does, I am going to go out on a limb and say they are there to join Russia in attacking Ukraine.

This makes two and three-quarters nuclear powers attacking Ukraine - Russia, North Korea and the almost nuclear power of Iran.

Iran does not currently have nuclear weapons, but the Wall Street Journal reports that Iran can make a nuke in a few months. Iran’s current contribution to Russia’s war effort has been sending a steady supply Shahed drones that seem calibrated to hit apartment buildings, shopping malls and hospitals. Iran has built a drone factory in Russia. I see their products almost nightly out my window in Kyiv. An Iranian drone hit a Kyiv apartment building tonight as I wrote this.

“Managing escalation” is a term frequently used by the Biden administration when talking about preventing Russia’s war on Ukraine from developing into WWIII. Biden outright said in 2022 that Putin was “not joking” about using nukes.

This fear of escalation and cowering to Putin’s nuclear saber rattling are at least in part products of a Russian propaganda campaign to create a “nuclear psychosis” in the West that was hatched by Putin’s deputy chief of staff in April 2022, as revealed by hacked Kremlin documents made public by the Department of Justice last summer.

Biden seems to be managing Ukraine’s escalation quite well. Not so much Putin’s. Biden’s fear of nuclear war has actually attracted more nuclear belligerents and increased the number of warheads at risk.

The term is frequently usually used in conjunction with slow walking weapons to Ukraine.

This may not be obvious to those of you who don’t have friends at the Ukrainian front, but it is obvious to Ukrainians.

I have the honor of working with several Ukrainian supreme court justices. There are more than 150 supreme court justices in Ukraine, and when the Russians attacked, about 35 of them organized another couple of hundred bureaucrats from the ministry of this, that and the other thing, grabbed a bunch of AK-47 rifles and ran toward the Russians.

When the Russians started targeting Kyiv with Iranian-made Shahed drones in the fall of 2022, the justices set up anti-drone installations on the top of Kyiv apartment buildings and began shooting the Shaheds down with WWII era machine guns.

Yuri and the Supremes, part of a group of Ukrainian Supreme Court justices who spend their spare time on top of Kyiv roofs shooting down Iranian drones with water-cooled machine guns far older than any of them.

As an American who worked in Congress, I am everyone’s suggestion box to the US government.

On a cold day in March of last year, Yuri, one of the justices, said to me “Steven, I understand Trump’s position. I don’t like it but I understand it. Stop giving us weapons, we can’t fight, the war is over. I also understand a position of giving us all the weapons we need to win. I don’t understand why Biden is giving us weapons at a slow drip.”

Yuri went on to say “We view ourselves as America’s partner in taking out your long-time adversary of Russia. You provide the weapons, and we provide the lives of our very best people. When your contribution slows down, our contribution goes up.”

The most obvious example is that of Abram tanks.

Biden promised Abrams tanks to Ukraine on January 25th of 2023, following months of his administration arguing that the Abrams system, designed for use in the Soviet Union, was too complex for the Ukrainians to use. Thirty-one tanks arrived ten months later in October 2023.

Why did it take ten months to get 31 tanks to Ukraine? A lot of slow walking. In late May, the US military began training Ukrainian soldiers - four months after Biden announced tanks would come to Ukraine. US soldiers are trained constantly on Abrams tanks. What was the holdup for the Ukrainians? The training was completed on August 31 of 2023. Six weeks later, the last tank arrived.

Somehow, demonstrating logistic ineptitude by the US military is supposed to keep Putin from using nuclear weapons.

It is hard to calculate how many Ukrainian soldiers died waiting for these tanks.

It is easier to get a sense of how many Ukrainian civilians have been killed because of the Biden Administration’s policy of not allowing American weapons to be used inside Russia.

Biden currently allows US weapons to be used in small parts of Russia under specific circumstances. With Bidne protecting his rear flank, Putin expends almost no resources in defending the scores of military targets just over the border, protecting his logistics and air bases. It also allows Russian planes to fly up to the Ukrainian border undeterred and drop glide bombs, massive Soviet era “dumb” munitions with wings affixed that glide forty miles into Ukraine.

Since the beginning of 2024, Russia has launched more than 3,700 glide bomb attacks on the Kharkiv region. I am not a aware of a similar count of deaths - although almost all the deaths are civilian and they number in the thousands - but I can tell you what I have seen personally. The attack below killed a 90 year old woman.

Yaroslav Bazylevych lives in Lviv, about an hour’s drive from the Polish border and as far away from the front as you can get. His wife and three daughters were killed by a Russian missile. This may have been prevented if the Biden administration had let Ukraine use US weapons in Russian territory. We interviewed him a few days after the tragedy.

Biden’s policy of managing escalation seems to attract additional nuclear combatants to the fight and get Ukrainian civilians killed. Please write me if you see any upside.

Managing escalation is not exactly appeasement, but it sure has that ring to it. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and the junior varsity team of Hamas, Hezbollah, Venezuela and the Houthis are all working together and they are the only folks acting on that information.

Biden could make a huge shift in the war tomorrow by allowing Ukraine to use them to win.

We are in a 1938 moment and Biden is old enough to remember World War II. Bullies like Putin respond strength, not management.