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Biden’s New Ukrainian Calculus

Before the invasion, the administration was hesitant to provide too many weapons to Ukraine since, the thinking went, they wouldn’t stop the inevitable and would likely end up in Putin’s hands. Now, the calculus is different.

President Biden
Photo by Chen Mengtong/Getty Images
Julia Ioffe
April 27, 2022

On Saturday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin would be visiting Kyiv on Sunday, when the Eastern Orthodox world celebrated Easter. Not only did he blow the surprise, which the administration didn’t seem to love for security reasons, he also added a bit of a barb to his announcement. “You can’t come to us empty-handed today,” he said. “We are expecting not just presents or some kind of cakes, we are expecting specific things and specific weapons.”