Blinken supports pressuring Russia despite nuclear instability concerns.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken: Sticking with Support for Ukraine
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is resolute in his commitment to supporting Ukraine, despite growing concerns about Russia’s instability and its potential threat to Western allies.
“The short answer is no,” Blinken said Wednesday when asked about changing U.S. policy in light of the Wagner Group’s aborted march on Moscow. “In terms of its support for Ukraine, exerting pressure on Russia, strengthening our own defensive alliance — we’re sticking with that program.”
Blinken’s statement serves as a firm response to the doubts expressed by Western nations following the Wagner Group’s failed attempt to march on Moscow. This brief uprising sparked discussions about whether the U.S. and European allies should fear the possibility of a Russian defeat in the war in Ukraine.
“We are not in agreement on the outcomes of what will happen if Ukraine wins this war and what that will do to Russia,” an unnamed Western official told Financial Times. Meanwhile, a European Union diplomat warned that “nobody wins from civil war in Russia.”
These warnings highlight the underlying disagreement that has characterized trans-Atlantic debates about the war in Ukraine. While Central and Eastern European states, which gained independence after the Soviet Union’s collapse, argue that yielding to Russian President Vladimir Putin would make NATO more vulnerable to Russian attacks, larger Western allies suggest that Putin might become more dangerous in defeat or be replaced by someone even more aggressive.
However, the more assertive stance of smaller NATO allies, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, has outweighed the more passive impulses of some NATO leaders.
“It’s a situation that we’ve been monitoring for some time, in the instability that will be caused by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who became the first Western European leader to provide Ukraine with NATO-designed main battle tanks. “Of course, we are prepared, as we always would be, for a range of scenarios.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has also voiced support for continuing Western aid to Ukraine.
“We should not underestimate the Russians,” Stoltenberg emphasized. “So, we need to continue to provide support to Ukraine, and that is exactly what NATO and NATO allies are doing with military support, but also support for the long term.”
Despite this, Blinken made it clear that the U.S. has more modest aspirations for the outcome of the conflict compared to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of reclaiming all Ukrainian territory from Russian forces. Blinken believes that peace talks will eventually be necessary.
“We’re also working in a sustainable way to help Ukraine build up its deterrent and defense capacity for the medium- and long-term so that Putin could not repeat this exercise in a year or two years or five years,” Blinken explained. “The biggest impediment right now to finding peace, a just and durable peace … is President Putin’s conviction that he can outlast Ukraine and [that] he can outlast all of us. The more we are able to disabuse him of that notion, the more likely it is that [at] some point, he’ll come to the table.”
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