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Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep, where we have called a plumber to try to turn off the news tap but are still waiting to hear back.
SitRep will be off next week for Thanksgiving. See you on the other side of the turkey.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: A brief history of U.S. President Joe Biden’s deliberative supply of weapons to Ukraine; the Five Eyes intelligence consortium meets in Japan; and the United States and China affirm that humans, not AI, should retain control of nuclear weapons.
In the days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Biden administration was finalizing plans to rush aid to Kyiv in anticipation. Among the items on the list were body bags and light arms to support the underground resistance that the White House expected would emerge in the wake of what they thought would be a bloody Russian victory, according to a source familiar with the administration’s planning.
The rest, they say, is history. Russia botched the invasion, and Ukrainian forces proved to be far more resilient than anticipated, forcing the Biden administration to craft its response on the fly.
The result has been a vital but halting supply of military aid to Ukraine that helped the country hold the line against Russian forces but, critics argue, has been insufficient to help Kyiv actually win the war.
Throughout the war, Ukraine’s requests for advanced weapons systems have met with months of hesitation and deliberation as the Biden administration has sought to thread a delicate needle, bolstering Kyiv’s war effort without getting dragged into a potentially catastrophic escalation spiral with Moscow.
That pattern has played out time and time again, as seen with Kyiv’s requests for F-16 fighter jets, the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), and permission to use U.S. weapons to strike into Russian territory.
That approach has opened Biden up to criticism from all sides: those who argue that the administration’s support hasn’t gone far enough and those who fear that it risks stumbling into a direct confrontation with another nuclear power.
A brief timeline of delays. Just a couple months into the war, Ukraine began asking the United States and its Western allies for modern F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, saying, “We have not received the tools we need to defend our sky and achieve victory.” But the Biden administration resisted doing so for months over concerns that Moscow would see it as an escalation. Then, in August 2023, Biden dropped his opposition. A year later, Ukraine received its first batch of U.S.-made F-16s.
A similar story played out with ATACMS. For more than a year after the war began, Ukraine repeatedly asked the Biden administration for the missile systems but was rebuffed each time, with U.S. officials saying they feared the use of such weapons would cross a red line for Moscow. In September 2023, after Ukraine’s use of similar missiles provided by France and the United Kingdom didn’t trigger a massive Russian escalation, Biden told Zelensky he had changed his mind and would provide ATACMS but only the shorter-range version that could hit targets 100 miles away.
The longer-range ones that Ukraine wanted, though, remained off the table. That is, until April, when the Biden administration agreed to send those to Ukraine as well—but on the condition that they only be used to hit targets in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including Crimea, and not inside Russia proper.
In the months since, Kyiv has pushed the White House to allow Ukrainian troops to use the long-range ATAMCS to target Russian soil, only to receive pushback from the Biden administration.
This week brought the news that the Biden administration had given the long-sought-after green light for Ukraine to use longer-range ATACMS to conduct strikes in Russian territory. While the weapons have a range of around 190 miles, Kyiv is expected to primarily use them in the Russian region of Kursk, parts of which have been held by Ukrainian forces since they launched a surprise cross-border counteroffensive in the summer.
Hindsight is 20/20. In an interview with PBS NewsHour this week, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan defended the administration’s handling of the war, noting that the policy from the get-go has been to “supply the means to Ukraine to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and they fight the war,” he said.
PBS’s Nick Schifrin asked Sullivan a question that has been on a lot of people’s minds this week regarding the administration’s deliberative approach to providing new weapons systems to Ukraine: “Do you believe, at this point, looking back, if you had provided any of those authorizations earlier, it would have made a difference to Ukraine in the war?”
“Our view has been that there’s not one weapons system that makes a difference in this battle. It’s about manpower, and Ukraine needs to do more, in our view, to firm up its lines in terms of the number of forces it has on the front lines,” Sullivan said. “It’s about munitions, and it’s about all of the other things that go to a country’s national strength—their morale, their cohesion, their industrial base.”
Here’s whom Trump has announced this week to staff the top foreign-policy and national security jobs in his next administration, including those who must still be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate and those who do not require confirmation.
Require Senate confirmation:
- Howard Lutnick: Commerce Secretary
- Pete Hoekstra:S. Ambassador to Canada
- Matthew Whitaker:S. Ambassador to NATO
- Pam Bondi: Attorney General
Withdrawn:
- Matt Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration to serve as attorney general.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Russia experiments. Russia fired a new, intermediate-range hypersonic missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in a televised address. The move came in response to the decision by the United States and United Kingdom to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons to strike targets within Russian territory. The U.S. Defense Department confirmed on Thursday that Russia had used an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile, based on Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh model, and that Washington was notified briefly before the launch through nuclear risk-reduction channels.
Misconduct allegations. Pete Hegseth, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as defense secretary, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, the Washington Post reported this week. The payment was made out of concern that the woman would file a lawsuit that could have jeopardized his job at Fox News, Hegseth’s lawyer told The Associated Press. Hegseth has not denied his encounter with the woman but has firmly maintained that it was consensual.
Hegseth is one of at least three of Trump’s cabinet picks, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Matt Gaetz, to have faced allegations of sexual misconduct. Gaetz has denied the claims (and dropped himself out of consideration), while RFK Jr. responded, “I am not a church boy,” when asked about allegations that he assaulted a nanny in 1998.
Six Eyes? Japan hosted a meeting of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing consortium on Wednesday in a sign of the Pacific nation’s growing importance in information-sharing amid escalating tensions with China. The gathering marks the first time the Anglosphere alliance has met outside of a member state but not the first time Tokyo has been involved in such a gathering, the Japan Times reports.
“AI for good for all.” That’s what the U.S. and Chinese presidents agreed to on Saturday in Lima, Peru. Most critically, they agreed that artificial intelligence should not lead to an end for all. Meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit for what was likely their last bilateral, the two presidents affirmed the “need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons” for the first time.
In a press conference following the meeting, Sullivan said there was no imminent risk of AI controlling nuclear weapons, but “you need to start somewhere, basic principles, and build from there when it comes to trying to develop a common basis for reducing nuclear risk.” Several outlets previously reported that a similar agreement was to be announced last November when the two leaders met in Woodside, California, but the final agreement only emerged this week.
Ukrainian military service members place lit candles in front of the Motherland Monument during a commemoration ceremony marking the 1,000th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the National Museum of History of Ukraine in the Second World War in Kyiv on Nov. 19.Roman Pilipey/AFP via Getty Images
Nov. 24: Romania holds a presidential election.
Uruguay holds a presidential election runoff.
Nov. 27: Namibia holds a general election.
Trump has tapped real estate developer Steve Witkoff to serve as his Middle East envoy. Witkoff, long a trusted member of Trump’s inner circle, shares the president-elect’s view of the Middle East as “one giant real estate deal,” according to a new profile in the Wall Street Journal.