Receive free War in Ukraine updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest War in Ukraine news every morning.
Joe Biden predicted the Ukraine war would not drag on for years and promised the US would remain committed to Nato despite fears Donald Trump might pull out of the alliance if he wins the 2024 presidential election.
Speaking in Finland, which became a member of Nato earlier this year, the US president said his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had been weakened and was struggling to supply his troops.
“I don’t think the war can go on for years,” Biden told reporters. “I don’t think Russia could maintain the war forever,” he said, arguing Moscow did not have the “resources and capacity” to sustain the conflict.
He added: “I think that there is going to be a circumstance where eventually President Putin is going to decide it’s not in the interest of Russia economically, politically or otherwise.”
While many in his administration and allied governments have been downbeat about the pace of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Biden said he hoped it would create the momentum for peace talks.
“My hope is and my expectation is you’ll see that Ukraine makes significant progress on their offensive and it generates a negotiated settlement somewhere along the line.”
Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive began in earnest in June but is off to a much slower start than Kyiv and many of its supporters had hoped.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly said the war can only end when Russia withdraws its troops, including from Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014 that has since been heavily militarised.
Biden’s trip to Finland is the first by a US president since Trump held a chaotic press conference there with Putin five years ago.
The US president and other members of the alliance repeatedly said this week that Nato is stronger and more united than ever. However, there are lingering fears that if Trump wins the 2024 election he could try to downgrade the leadership role of the US in Nato or even pull out entirely.
“As sure as anything can possibly be said about American foreign policy, we will stay connected to Nato,” Biden said.
Speaking alongside Biden, Finland’s president Sauli Niinistö said he had held multiple meetings with lawmakers, including Republicans, as part of consultations to join Nato and said he was confident in the long term commitment of the US.
“The message was quite clear, quite united,” he said. “I have no reason to doubt USA policies in the future.”
Meanwhile, Biden poked fun at the recent mutiny attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s erstwhile ally and founder of the Wagner mercenary group that has played a central role in Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine.
“We’re not even sure where he is and what relationship he has [with Putin],” Biden said of Prigozhin. “If I were he, I‘d be careful what I ate, I’d be keeping an eye on my menu.”
Czech president Petr Pavel was among those at this week’s Nato summit in Vilnius who warned that a lack of progress on the ground in Ukraine would likely lead to negotiations based on whatever gains Kyiv can make by the end of the year.
Zelenskyy said last week that Russia’s dense network of fortifications and minefields had presented significant challenges for the country’s Nato-trained brigades.
Ukrainian troops have had limited success near the bombed-out city of Bakhmut in the country’s east and in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, but at a significant cost.
“We are fighting hard but it’s a fight that goes forward metre by metre and is paid for with a lot of blood,” a soldier in Ukraine’s 17th Tank Brigade by the name of Danylo told the Financial Times near the frontline in Donetsk region this week.
This week’s Nato summit was marred by disagreements over how quickly Ukraine could join the alliance. Putin on Thursday said that Kyiv’s potential membership would create new threats for Russia and claimed Moscow was open to discussing alternative security arrangements.
Putin told state television that Ukraine’s drive to join Nato was one of the reasons he ordered his full-scale invasion of the country last year.
“I’m certain this won’t increase Ukraine’s security, and it will make the world much more vulnerable in general and lead to additional tension on the international arena,” Putin said.
He added that Russia believed that draft agreements on security arrangements for Ukraine outside Nato — discussed during failed peace talks during the war’s early weeks — were “acceptable” if “Russia’s security is ensured”.
But those proposals, which imply Ukraine would accept caps on its military and the effective loss of its occupied territories, are a non-starter for Ukraine given its determination to take back all of its land.
Read the full article here
