Will Biden’s Help for Ukraine Come Fast Enough and Last Long Enough?

BARI, Italy — U.S. President Joe Biden has consistently resisted pressure during 27 months of war to let Ukraine into NATO, convinced that it could quickly result in U.S. troops being sent into direct combat with the Russians.

So, on Thursday, he rolled out alternative steps designed to demonstrate to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States and its allies had no intention of packing up and leaving.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

Biden signed a 10-year security pact with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Biden portrayed as guaranteeing a supply of weapons, intelligence support, advice and technology needed to win the war and deter a new one.

He also said the United States would take the lead in providing Ukraine with a $50 billion loan to rebuild its devastated ports and power plants and to buy weapons. The money is to be repaid from interest generated from $300 billion in assets that Putin, inexplicably, left in Western financial institutions before his February 2022 invasion.

“Our goal is to strengthen Ukraine’s credible defense and deterrence capabilities for the long term,” Biden said moments after he and Zelenskyy signed the accord on the southwest coast of Italy, where the Group of 7 industrialized nations opened their annual leaders conference.

“We’re not backing down," he added, warning Putin that “he cannot wait us out.”

Zelenskyy thanked Biden warmly, even though the security pact and loan were far short of what he wanted at this grave moment in the war. Zelenskyy has made no secret of the fact that it is hard to focus on Ukraine’s long-term prospects when he is desperately worried about surviving the short term in the face of relentless, if incremental, Russian advances.

But the bigger worry for Ukraine’s increasingly embattled leader and for all of Europe is that the accords themselves may not survive the outcome of the American election and Europe’s recent one.

The security pact, based on similar, decade-long commitments to Israel, contains no funding — just an American commitment to work with Congress to secure the tens of billions of dollars that would be required. That most likely means another bruising fight on Capitol Hill, where a bare majority of Republicans in Congress had for months opposed any more commitments of funds and the arms they buy before funding was approved in April.

But the bigger concern for Zelenskyy is that Biden, with whom his relationship has often been contentious, might be at his last G7 summit. And buried in the fine print of the security agreement they signed with flair lies this paragraph: “Either Party may terminate this Agreement by providing a written notification through diplomatic channels” that would “take effect 6 months after.”

That is exactly the kind of loophole that former U.S. President Donald Trump exploited with the Iran nuclear agreement, which he abandoned in 2018. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for Ukraine or his desire to rid the United States of a huge financial commitment there. Instead, he has insisted he could end the war in 24 hours — presumably by telling Putin he can keep the territory he has already seized.

“It’s an agreement that really captures the moment,” said Seth G. Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent research institute in Washington, who just returned from a visit to Ukraine. “On the one hand, it’s a useful step to establish a long-term relationship with Ukraine. On the other hand, it is very much short of what the Ukrainians really want: real NATO membership” that, unlike the piece of paper both men signed with such flair, is hard to revoke.

The $50 billion loan, if disbursed this year, is harder for a future president to reverse. And the money is coming just in time: Ukraine’s budgetary situation is so dire that it has been forced to sell some state assets.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, an architect of the loan plan that leaves Russia’s principal untouched but uses the interest it earns, said at an event in New York on Thursday that it demonstrated to Putin that Ukraine’s allies were “completely united.”

“We intend to give Ukraine the resources it needs to wage an effective war against Russia and to support their direct budget needs, and we’re going to provide a very meaningful chunk of resources,” she said.

“This is the first tranche, and if necessary, there’s more behind it,” Yellen said. “In a sense, we’re getting Russia to help pay for the damage it’s caused.”

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said Thursday that all the members of the G7 countries would participate in the loan, and the European Union might contribute up to half the money, a senior European official said. The U.S. would make up the difference.

But the loan is in a race against time and Russia’s destructive capability.

For the first two years of the war, it was assumed that time was on Ukraine’s side — that Putin would have to back down if the war stretched on too long. Now, no one is so sure that is still the case.

Until recent days, the Russians for months appeared to have the momentum — although now, they have been slowed after Biden, reversing himself, allowed Ukraine to shoot U.S.-provided weapons onto the Russian side of the border near Ukraine’s northeast city of Kharkiv. Biden and his aides called it a “common sense” move, denying Putin the chance to attack Ukraine without fear of retribution.

The reversal was also born of the fear that the Ukrainian leader was running out of options. He is clearly short of troops and air defenses. He may be short of time.

Ukraine’s currently precarious position is notably different from what it was a few months into the war in 2022, when it seemed as if Russia’s military was collapsing. In 2023, there was hope that a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” would push Russia’s forces out of the country. It flopped.

On Thursday, for all the talk of sticking with the war “as long as it takes,” there was little discussion, at least within earshot of reporters, of what a realistic endgame might look like. The new security accord refers to a “just and lasting peace” without defining what that means — or what happens if a just peace is in tension with a lasting one.

Putin also seems to have a remarkably high tolerance for pain — or at least the suffering of his troops.

More than 1,000 Russian soldiers were either killed or wounded on average each day in May, senior NATO and Western military officials said Thursday. Ukraine’s forces are increasingly stepping up offensive operations as more Western military aid finally reaches the battlefield, after months of delay.

A Western military official said that Russia’s assault against Kharkiv has “culminated” and was not expected to continue to advance in the immediate future, and that Ukrainian strikes on artillery bases inside Russia were beginning to degrade its attacks.

But a senior NATO official, who provided an assessment at a briefing, said Russia was expected to “wage a pretty significant push” in coming weeks in a likely bloody rebuttal to any of Ukraine’s revived military capabilities. And Russia, the official said, would love nothing better than to mar the celebration of NATO’s 75th anniversary in Washington next month.

“None of us should be under the illusion that it’s going to be an easy summer,” the official said.

Only after surviving that, and the coming election, will Biden and Zelenskyy be able to jointly think about what Ukraine’s long-term future might look like. Otherwise, all bets are off, including how long the partnership they agreed to on Thursday will actually last.

c.2024 The New York Times Company