BRUSSELS – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to the Ukrainian capital over the weekend, leading the second senior American delegation to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky in a week and express support for her country’s fight to defeat the Russian invasion.
With each visit – the foreign and defense ministers traveled to Kyiv last weekend – the promise of America’s commitment to Ukraine’s victory seems to grow, even as the United States’ definition of victory remains uncertain.
On Sunday, the day after her visit to Ukraine, Pelosi told a news conference in Poland: “America supports Ukraine. We stand with Ukraine until victory is won. And we support NATO.”
Pelosi, the second person to replace President Biden, is the highest-ranking American official to visit Kyiv since the war began, and her words carry weight, seeming to underscore the expanded view of America’s and allies’ war goals.
His visit, with a congressional delegation, follows a joint visit to Kyiv by Foreign Ministers Antony J. Blinken and Defense Ministers Lloyd J. Austin III just last Sunday. Mr Austin caused some controversy and debate afterward when he appeared to shift the goals of the war from defending Ukraine’s independence and territorial sovereignty to weakening Russia.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do the things it did in invading Ukraine,” Austin said, implying that the United States would want to erode Russia’s military might for years to come—perhaps as long as Vladimir V. Putin, president Russia, still in power.
In a positive development on Sunday, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross helped organize what was described as the “ongoing” evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, where they are sheltering in dwindling numbers. Ukrainian soldiers who refuse to surrender to Russia. Between 80 and 100 civilians arrived in a convoy of buses at the temporary accommodation center 18 miles east of town, in the village of Bezimenne.
The evacuations appeared to be the fruit of visits to Putin in Moscow and Zelensky in Kyiv last week by António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who called the war in Ukraine an “absurdity.” Guterres and the Red Cross have worked to obtain humanitarian aid and food and water supplies for civilians trapped by the fighting; any serious peace negotiations still seem a long way off.
In a Twitter message, Zelensky praised the evacuation of what he said was “the first group of about 100 people,” and said that “tomorrow we will meet them in Zaporizhzhia.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said in a statement that it would not provide details on the effort while it was continuing; Further evacuations are expected to resume on Monday.
Russian troops in the end have not been able to take the last piece of Mariupol, which is no longer militarily important but has become an inspiring symbol of Ukrainian courage, morale and resistance that will surely go down in Ukrainian history.
But if there is a new allied consensus about supplying Ukraine with heavier and more sophisticated weapons for the final stage of the war in eastern Ukraine, there is no allied consensus about shifting the war’s objectives from Ukraine to Russia.
There is a feeling in Europe that “the US is dragging everyone into a different war,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, citing similar comments by President Biden about “Moscow butchers” and how “Putin must go.”
Some have wondered what Washington was trying to say – or do.
“To help Ukraine win is not about waging war against Russia for reasons related to its government,” Heisbourg said. “Regime change may be a vision, but it is not the goal of war.”
He and others say that such talk from Washington plays perfectly into Putin’s narrative that NATO is waging war against Russia, and that Russia is waging a defensive war for survival in Ukraine. That might give Putin a reason on May 9, the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, to declare this “special military operation” war, which would allow him, if he wished, to mobilize the population and use conscription. wide in battle.
Talk of a victory over Russia “gives easy ammunition to the other side and creates fear that the West may go further, and that’s not what we want,” said Ulrich Speck, a Germany analyst. “We don’t want to cut Russia to pieces.”
Gérard Araud, former French ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, commented on Twitter: “Support to Ukraine in its modalities and objectives must be agreed at a political level between allies. Currently, we are sleepwalking to no one knows where. ”
In response, Moscow has taken up its own rhetorical tone.
On Wednesday, Putin said that any country that “created a strategic threat to Russia” during this war in Ukraine could expect a “retaliatory strike” that would be “lightning-quick.” A few days earlier, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said in an interview that “NATO is basically going to war with Russia through proxies and arming those proxies.”
Putin’s military, after losing what Britain estimates have killed at least 15,000 people in action — which is more than in the entire Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan — has struggled to cut off Western supplies of arms, ammunition and heavy weapons to Ukraine. troops in eastern Ukraine.
On Sunday, Russia said it had bombed a runway and ammunition dump at a military airfield near Odesa which stores Western weapons, and Russia had attempted to attack roads and especially the railway terminal, as most of the heavy weapons were heading east by train. fire. Russia’s goal is to slowly cut off or encircle most of the Ukrainian army east of the Dnipro River and deprive it of new supplies.
But the grinding effort was slow, with heavy artillery fighting and high casualties on both sides.
It’s not just the Ukrainian military that’s in short supply. There is now a shortage of gasoline and diesel, at least for civilian use, stemming from the Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports and attacks on refineries and fuel depots. Long lines of gasoline have been seen even in cities like Lviv, and there are concerns about the impact the shortage will have on agriculture, even on fields untouched by war.
A report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said that only a fifth of the nearly 1,300 large agribusinesses surveyed by the government in mid-March had enough fuel to operate the agricultural equipment needed to grow corn, barley and other crops this spring, already causing rising food prices in countries far from Ukraine.
In an indication of a possible lethargy of Russian morale, the chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, General Valery V. Gerasimov, the country’s highest uniformed officer, paid a visit to dangerous front-line positions in eastern Ukraine this weekend in a bid to “change the course” of Russia’s offensive there. , according to a senior Ukrainian official familiar with the visit.
Ukrainian troops launched an attack on the Russian headquarters in Izium on Saturday evening, but General Gerasimov had already left to return to Russia, the official said. However, some 200 soldiers, including at least one general, were killed, said the Ukrainian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive military operation. A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that General Gerasimov had been in eastern Ukraine but did not confirm the rest of the Ukrainian accounts.
Fighting has escalated around the eastern major city of Kharkiv in recent days as Ukrainian forces attempt to repel Russian units. While the gains were small, they were emblematic of the strategy of Ukrainian and Russian forces as the war entered its third month, which focused on one village at a time and used concentrated artillery fire to repel each other.
The Ukrainian military said in a statement on Saturday that it had managed to retake four villages around Kharkiv: Verkhnya Rohanka, Ruska Lozova, Slobidske and Prilesne. The claims are difficult to verify as most of the area is currently closed to the media; on Sunday, Ukraine announced that it had rejected Russian advances towards villages in the Donbas, but that could not be confirmed either.
Ukrainian troops are also suspected of carrying out another attack on the border near the Russian city of Belgorod, a staging area for Russian troops, where a fire broke out at a defense ministry facility, the regional governor said.
Russian forces controlling the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson and surrounding provinces began enforcing the transition to the Russian ruble from the Ukrainian currency on Sunday, a move Ukrainian officials described as part of efforts to wipe out parts of the country. purged its national identity and implanted it within Moscow’s sphere of influence.
At the same time, the Ukrainian side reported on Sunday that almost all mobile and internet services in the area were cut off. Ukraine’s Interior Ministry accused Russian troops of stopping service, saying it was an attempt to prevent Ukraine from seeing real information about the war.
Hollywood actor Angelina Jolie, who has been special representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees since 2011, made a surprise visit of her own to Ukraine over the weekend, visiting the western city of Lviv to meet Ukrainian refugees from the east who have found refuge. there, including children undergoing treatment for injuries sustained in a Russian missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station in early April.
Pelosi was accompanied by legislators whose comments largely echoed her own.
“This is a freedom struggle against tyranny,” said Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. “And in that struggle, Ukraine is at the forefront.”
Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado, a veteran and member of the House armed services and intelligence committee, said the focus was on arms supplies. “We have to make sure Ukraine has what they need to win,” he said. Praising Ukraine’s courage, he said, “The United States is here to win, and we will support Ukraine until victory is won.”
But as always, what is meant by “victory,” whether it involves pushing Russia completely out of Ukraine or simply blocking its progress until its offensive runs out and negotiations take place, remains an open question. So is the central question of what Putin decides is victory enough for a war of his own choice.