The Biden administration is struggling to navigate the Ukrainian crisis, trying to carefully balance its desire to help Kiev in its fight against Russian troops conducting the special operation, and the risks of provoking a conflict with Moscow, The New York Times reported, citing anonymous officials.
According to the newspaper, the White House summoned government lawyers to discussions with the Pentagon regarding what lethal weapons could be delivered to Ukraine without violating international law. However, the legal advice has only provided limited help in easing the White House's headache from solving this task, the newspaper sources added.
"The judgments of government lawyers are valuable only up to a point, and that all that really matters is the judgment of one person: Mr. Putin. The Russian president has his own complex calculus about when the military support to Ukraine from the United States and its NATO allies crosses the line", the newspaper wrote, citing accounts of anonymous officials.
As a result, the Biden administration faces a "tangle of decisions, and sometimes tortured distinctions" as it tries to determine what assistance it can safely offer Kiev, the NY Times said. These deliberations reportedly resulted in the rejection of the no-fly zone idea and the shipments of jet fighters to Ukraine, but gave the green light to supplies of anti-tank weaponry.
"Such is the tenuous balance the Biden administration has tried to maintain as it seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation", the New York Times outlined.
These limited shipments are being overseen by CIA officers, sources claim. However, the volumes are much smaller than when the spy agency supplied Afghan Mujahedeen with weapons to fight Soviet troops in the 1980s, the sources say. It was another result of the deliberations at the White House, which decided that such assistance would be an "unnecessary provocation".
In its desperation to scrape together any valid help for Ukraine, the White House even considered negotiating the delivery of S-400s from Turkey – the very systems Ankara ordered in 2017 and which spoiled relations between the two NATO allies. After severing Turkey from F-35 shipments over the purchase, Washington is now considering trying to convince Ankara to ditch the systems another way – by gifting them to Kiev. It is unclear, however, if the White House has decided to go forward with this plan.
US President Joe Biden earlier turned down repeated requests from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine after Russia launched a special military operation to demilitarise and "de-Nazify" the country. Biden said that there won't be a no-fly zone above Ukraine and not a single US soldier will be sent to fight in the country, as either option might trigger a Third World War. POTUS stressed that such an armed conflict could end up being a nuclear one.
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