Biden’s Mistaking Zelensky for Putin at NATO Summit Signals He’s Out to Lunch

Might a “Hello, my name is Volodymr” sticker on President Zelensky’s shirt have helped? Possibly, but publicly mistaking the Ukrainian leader for the Russian one, which President Biden did Wednesday at Vilnius, was the cringe felt around the world. “Vladimir and I …,” Mr. Biden stated at a press conference before stammering, “I shouldn’t be so familiar,” and then correcting himself with, “Mr. Zelensky and I.” It was one of the low points of an overly publicized two-day NATO parley that will be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, for a litany of awkward social moments bordering on parody.What else to make of the British defense secretary’s not-so-subtle scolding of Ukraine over its persistent push for more weapons? “Whether we like it or not, people want to see a bit of gratitude,” Ben Wallace said at a briefing on the sidelines of the summit. “Sometimes you are asking countries to give up their own stocks.” Mr. Wallace added that the nonstop demands risked alienating some constituencies, including “lawmakers on the Hill.” He said that he traveled to Ukraine last year after an 11-hour drive “to be given a list” and subsequently told officials at Kyiv, “You know, we’re not Amazon.”The remarks were all the more startling considering that Britain has already given nearly $6 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, second only to America. The comments prompted some consternation in Ukraine, which after all is fighting a war. Mr. Zelensky latterly replied: “We have always been grateful and always are grateful. I just don’t know how else we should be thankful. Let [Mr. Wallace] write me how to thank him, and I will thank him.”Our national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, echoed some of Mr. Wallace’s sentiments, saying at Vilnius, “I think the American people, the American government does deserve a degree of gratitude for their willingness to step up” to help Ukraine.Back in Washington, Senator Paul reminded the Ukrainian president that America has given billions of dollars in military assistance to Kyiv and said that Mr. Zelensky “should not look a gift horse in the mouth.” The senator’s admonishment followed Mr. Zelensky’s complaint that it was “absurd” for NATO to not offer Ukraine a timeline for membership in the alliance. Meanwhile, if Mr. Biden was trying to project an image of power, he missed the mark. As for his remark to President Erdogan that “I look forward to being with you in the next five years, Mr. President,” that could be perceived as presumptuous at best and wishful thinking at worst. All of this is of course catnip to the Kremlin, whose state-backed press had a field day with every rhetorical sling and arrow at Vilnius: “NATO summit ends with Ukraine sidelined, Zelensky shut up, and China insulted” is how one headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda read. Mr. Biden’s blunders notwithstanding, the testy repartee at Vilnius underlined some big problems for NATO and the course of the war that critics like Dr. Paul say NATO risks perpetuating. A fixation on expansion risks blurring the focus on Ukraine — where after more than a year of fighting Russia is still on the offensive. That in turn leads to understandable exasperation on the part of Mr. Zelensky, but patience elsewhere in Europe is also growing thin. In Germany, Italy, France, and even Britain, look for more anti-war voices from fringe parties on the right and left to make some noise before summer’s end. Let it not be lost on Mr. Biden — though maybe it is lost, considering that he cannot seem to distinguish the Ukrainian name “Volodymr” from the Russian name “Vladimir” — that the longer the war goes on, the more it mirrors his own foreign policy failures.The latest indication of that has to do with the Biden administration’s attempts early on in the invasion to decouple Russia from the global economy. When countries like Turkey and Israel refused to join in sanctioning Moscow, the White House simply doubled down.While doing do so has caused considerable damage to the Russian economy, it has not crushed it — the Russian capacity for getting by with less is one of the fundamental lessons of European history. Is it beginning to repeat itself? The deal concluded between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the UN a year ago for the safe export of Ukrainian grain from its Black Sea ports is about to expire. So this week the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, sent a letter to President Putin with a proposal to reconnect the Russian state-owned Rosselkhozbank to the SWIFT international payment system as an incentive to extend the grain deal. What that shows, if nothing else, is that if the Biden administration was banking on beating Russia in Ukraine by isolating it on the world stage, it is not really working out that way. That the Turks may have been savvier than us all along should give this president’s diminishing roster of fans pause.

Biden’s Mistaking Zelensky for Putin at NATO Summit Signals He’s Out to Lunch

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