Donald Trump’s bodyguard strongly denounced on Monday, November 18, Joe Biden’s decision to authorize Ukraine to strike Russian territory with American-made long-range missiles. The democratic president has in fact acceded to a long-standing request from kyiv, a bold turnaround in the last weeks of his mandate.
This decision, which the Biden administration has not publicly confirmed, and the outgoing president’s promise to accelerate military aid to Ukraine, come in the midst of a transition of power in the United States and as Donald Trump and his allies criticize American aid to kyiv.
It comes especially as the word negotiation is increasingly being whispered to try to put an end to the conflict, caused by the Russian invasion in February 2022. Ukraine fears being forced into negotiations which would be unfavorable to it, against a backdrop of progress by Moscow on the ground.
“All this for politics”
Echoing the Kremlin, which promised an “appropriate” response in the event of these ATACMS missiles being fired against Russia, Donald Trump’s entourage accused Joe Biden of risking an escalation “for political purposes”. “This is a new stage in the escalation and no one knows where it will lead us,” denounced on the Fox channel the elected representative of Florida, Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s next national security adviser, a key position. “No one anticipated that Joe Biden would be responsible for the escalation of the war in Ukraine during the transition period. It’s as if he was starting a whole new war,” Richard Grenell, former director of Acting National Intelligence during Trump’s first term (2017-2021). “Everything has changed now […] And all this for politics,” he accused.
“The American people gave a mandate on November 5th against these exact latest decisions of America and do NOT want to finance or take part in foreign wars. We want to solve our own problems”, also wrote on X another supporter of Donald Trump, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Not to be outdone, the son of the next president, Donald Trump Jr, denounced, also on the possibility of establishing peace and saving lives.
On the Russian side, Vladimir Dzhabarov, deputy head of the foreign affairs committee of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, called the American green light “a very big step towards the start of World War III” and an attempt to “reduce the degree of freedom of Donald Trump”, according to Associated Press.
Donald Trump’s allies push for negotiation
James Gilmore, Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) during his first term, however gave a divergent opinion at the BBC. According to him, the main problem with this decision is that “the Biden administration was slow to react.” He assures that it was “Putin who escalated the war” by deploying North Korean soldiers, and that the United States could not “stand aside and let this dictator go ahead and conquer the Ukraine”. “I don’t like it and I take it all very seriously, but the decision is not ours. The decision is imposed on us by Putin, by the dictator,” he said.
The intentions of the future Trump administration regarding the Ukraine file are anything but clear. The former president, who will return to the White House on January 20, promised to end the war in “24 hours” and questioned the tens of billions of dollars spent by Washington on the Ukraine – more than $60 billion in military aid since the Russian invasion. Donald Trump did not react publicly to the green light given by Joe Biden, but his campaign team indicated that he was “the only one capable of getting the two parties to negotiate peace and work to end the war and killings”, according to its spokesperson Steven Cheung. “How do we bring both sides to the negotiating table to end this war? What is the framework of an agreement and who sits at that table? These are the questions that President Trump and I will address work”, also indicated Mike Waltz.
In the meantime, President Biden is seeking to outdo his successor, and to set markers that the next administration will have difficulty undoing, with the aim of strengthening kyiv’s position in the event of negotiations.