Pentagon chief's surprise visit to Kyiv: What’s the purpose?

On October 21, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv bearing a message of strong US commitment to Ukraine’s war effort but with no new military assistance or permission for its forces to use long-range missiles inside Russia.

Austin, a former four-star Army general, has led the Western response to the conflict since the early days of the war, coordinating more than $64 billion in US military aid for Kyiv and tens of billions more from Europe, Caliber.Az reports per The Wall Street Journal.

But his visit to Kyiv, an unannounced stop that will likely be his last to the Ukrainian capital as Pentagon chief, underscored the continuing debate over whether the Biden administration—and Austin himself—has hobbled Ukraine’s war effort with a cautious approach to providing American-made weapons and restrictions on their use.

The administration has refused to budge on Ukraine’s two primary asks: allowing its forces to strike into Russia with US-supplied weapons and North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership.

Austin arrived in Kyiv with no major announcements, aides said. 

Austin’s incremental approach has allowed Ukraine to survive but not to shift the war decisively, critics say. With more of the weapons Ukraine asked for in the early days of the conflict, according to the critics, Kyiv wouldn’t be losing ground today on the front lines—a claim Austin’s defenders reject.

The notion that Ukraine would be winning if only the US had supplied more advanced weapons is “one of the greatest myths in Washington,” said Colin Kahl, who served as the Pentagon’s top policy official until July. 

“It engages in a series of magical thinking, where you can move things instantaneously, give Ukrainians things they are not trained on, have them appear out of thin air, and it assumes there is no trade-offs,” Kahl said. 

In Kyiv, Austin is set to meet with Zelenskyy and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. His visit comes as Ukrainian forces are losing ground in the East, and Zelenskyy has struggled to persuade the West to support his “Victory Plan,” which includes requests for additional weapons as well as NATO membership. 

Notably, the US administration last week announced its latest package of military aid for Ukraine, including $425 million worth of air defences, air-to-ground missiles, armoured vehicles and other munitions.

The Biden administration’s overly cautious approach has often been too little, too late, said Heather Conley, senior adviser at the German Marshall Fund. 

“If we would’ve been clear and upfront and given them full capabilities, would that have sent a different message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin? Maybe he would have recalculated a bit what he was doing,” said Conley. “But he saw delay, hesitancy.”

By Aghakazim Guliyev