This Ukraine Business Is Very Strange

Biden's national security handler Jake Sullivan seems to be wandering into Tom Clancy territory, writing thrillers about hypothetical wars:

Sullivan told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that Russian forces are positioned so that an invasion could take place before the end of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which end on February 20.

. . . Sullivan on Friday had warned Americans in Ukraine to leave and said that military action could begin with an aerial bombardment that could kill civilians.

He reiterated those calls to Tapper on Sunday, saying that a military attack would likely begin with missile and bomb attacks.

"Those are never as precise as the army -- any army -- would like them to be. We don't even know how precise the Russian army would like them to be," Sullivan said. "Innocent civilians could be killed regardless of their nationality. It would then be followed by an onslaught of a ground force moving across the Ukrainian frontier. Again, where innocent civilians could get caught in the cross fire or trapped in places they could not move from. So that is why we are being so clear and direct to American citizens that while commercial transport options are still available, they should take advantage of them."

So not only are the Russians about to invade, but hey, they're about to commit atrocities. Starring Jake Sullivan as Harrison Ford, or maybe Harrison Ford as Joe Biden. Or something. Meanwhile, nothing's changed in Ukraine:

What did we just witness? I refer to the two-month frenzy that seized the Western media, in which Vladimir Putin was massing 175,000 troops on Ukraine’s border for an invasion to begin right about now. The Washington Post led on December 3, 2021, with those big numbers and was duly followed by others. A gigantic massing of forces was taking place. Putin was threatening an invasion and had mobilized his forces to accomplish the final breakage of Ukraine. President Joe Biden was a believer, ordering evacuations from embassies in Ukraine and Belarus. He told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in late January that blood would almost certainly flow in the streets of Kiev, the national capital; “prepare for impact” sometime soon, probably in February.

And then a surprising thing happened. The Ukrainian president, the guy whose lead we were apparently following, said, in effect, cut it out. Not true. You’re panicking people in Ukraine, hurting its economy, and besides the Russian troop movements were really nothing out of the ordinary.

. . . This contretemps between the leader of the Free World and the president of the Ukrainian “great power” was very disturbing to the Washington establishment. They thought that Zelensky had flubbed his performance. He was apparently unaware of his proper role. “We’re his most important ally and he’s poking us in the eye and creating daylight between Washington and Kyiv,” said a senior administration official. “It’s self-sabotage more than anything else.”

The story suggests the current manufactured crisis is the result of policy confusion created by Biden's handlers at the start of his administration:

The new team at the White House, closely following a script announced by the Atlantic Council, declared that Crimea and the Donbas must be put back on the table. That meant, explained a Biden official, a “very extensive and almost constant focus on Ukraine from day one.” In the view of Democrats, Donald Trump had been a shameless appeaser of Putin; indeed, he was Putin’s puppet. This narrative, to be sure, was dubious in the extreme, as Trump the ostensible appeaser surrounded himself with advisors—H.R. McMaster, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, James Mattis, and John Bolton—who regularly blasted Russia in scalding tones. But though the narrative may have been wrong, it was theirs. The Democrats believed it. Where Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken largely followed Trump’s line on China, they broke sharply with him over Ukraine.

. . . Russia’s callup of reserves—which both now and in April was interpreted by U.S. intelligence as reflecting plans for a gigantic invasion—was in direct response to . . . important developments: . . . a new U.S. posture toward Ukraine-related issues that was far more aggressive than Trump’s, and the declaration by Ukraine’s military that they were working on a plan to drive the Russians out of [Donbas and Crimea]. When Biden said in December that the United States would not commit forces to Ukraine in the event of a war, it took the legs out from under this plan.

So why keep stirring up a crisis-that's not-a-crisis? That seems to be what's going on:

Biden officials have repeatedly claimed for more than a month that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent,” prompting protests in the country from officials who complained that the reality on the ground on Ukraine’s eastern border did not match the rhetoric out of the White House and that the latter was tanking Ukraine’s economy – making an invasion more likely.

In early February, Biden officials appeared to announce a retirement of the use of the word “imminent” given the growing discontent in Ukraine, bizarrely claiming that the discord between Washington and Kyiv was a product of how the word translated into Ukrainian.

But there's been no consistency. The story continues:

“I used that [the word imminent] once,” Psaki said on February 2. “And then we stopped using it because I think it sent an — a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision.”

“I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, we said, ‘He could invade at any time.’ That’s true; we still don’t know that he’s made a decision,” Psaki claimed.

Biden himself said during the fateful “minor incursion” press conference that he believed Putin had decided to invade again.

At best, the explanation is incompetence. However, if no invasion takes place by the middle of this week, people need to start asking serious questions about who's in charge.