by Joe Biden
By February 2015, as I headed toward Munich, Vladimir Putin had signaled that he was no longer happy playing by the rules Soviet leaders had accepted as part of the historic and far-reaching Helsinki Accords in 1975. He was willing to test European resolve on the principle of the sanctity of borders, and he was doing so with impunity in Ukraine. My main objective in Munich was to continue to encourage our European allies to stand with us, to make sure Putin understood that Russia would pay a price for bullying a weaker neighbor.
* * *
The Ukrainian people had been on a thrilling and sometimes harrowing roller coaster for the previous year, and I felt like I had been on it with them. A popular demonstration, which started at a square in Kyiv in late 2013, when President Viktor Yanukovych reneged on his promise to take the country into the European Union, had grown from a spontaneous eruption to a real political movement—one President Yanukovych mishandled badly. I had known and worked with Yanukovych since 2009, and I knew he was in a tough spot. While popular pressure mounted on Yanukovych to honor his EU pledge, Putin was obviously tightening the screws on him to resist the movement and tie the country more closely to Russia. Yanukovych did not handle the situation well. He resisted the democratic Revolution of Dignity in Maidan Nezalezhnosti with increasing force, eventually loosing his riot police on the streets of Kyiv to disrupt, injure, and finally murder demonstrators. The protesters in the Maidan found themselves in a war zone, enduring a brutal three-month siege in the dead of winter. They refused to back down, even in the face of death, and transformed the square where the protest began into an armed camp. Demonstrators seized administration buildings and erected barricades so they could set up command centers, mess halls, and aid stations for people beaten and bloodied by Yanukovych’s uniformed police and his secret plainclothes thugs. The crowds of protesters grew to more than fifty thousand and just kept growing. By the middle of February 2014, they were inching toward the Parliament building.
I made the last of many urgent calls to Yanukovych in late February of 2014, when his snipers were assassinating Ukrainian citizens by the dozens and we had credible reports that he was contemplating an even more vicious crackdown. I had been warning him for months to exercise restraint in dealing with his citizens, but on this night, three months into the demonstrations, I was telling him it was over; time for him to call off his gunmen and walk away. His only real supporters were his political patrons and his operators in the Kremlin, I reminded him, and he shouldn’t expect his Russian friends to rescue him from this disaster. Yanukovych had lost the confidence of the Ukrainian people, I said, and he was going to be judged harshly by history if he kept killing them. The disgraced president fled Ukraine the next day—owing to the courage and determination of the demonstrators—and control of the government ended up temporarily in the hands of a young patriot named Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Elation in Ukraine was followed by bad news a few days later. Vladimir Putin, displeased that he had lost his puppet in Kyiv, immediately sent a force across the border and annexed the Ukrainian oblast (province) of Crimea. The West condemned the annexation but did little else. And Putin just kept going. He menaced other oblasts in the east of Ukraine for the next six months and sent Russian tank units across the border to slaughter Ukrainians who resisted. A cease-fire he signed in September 2014, the Minsk agreement, did little to hold him back. Nearly a thousand people were killed in the two months after the cease-fire went into effect. The number of internally displaced Ukrainians was climbing toward five hundred thousand, as was the number of Ukrainian refugees. At the beginning of February 2015, as I headed back to Europe, Putin-backed separatists were making an assault on Ukrainian soldiers holding Debaltseve, a strategic road and railway junction fifty miles in from the Russian border. And Putin was doing everything he could to destabilize the Ukrainian economy and force a collapse of the newly elected government in Kyiv.
I was the point man for our administration on the crisis, which was exactly where I wanted to be. There were academics in the news saying Ukraine was bound to be a defeat for the West, and it would be an unwelcome albatross on my neck if I ran for president in 2016. “He’s tied to Ukraine policy,” a presidential scholar from Pennsylvania told a reporter. “So he could be vulnerable.” I didn’t much care. There was an important principle at stake: big countries ought not to beat up smaller ones, especially after they had given their word not to. What made the attack on Ukraine particularly galling was that Putin had violated a long-held international norm, as well as an explicit agreement. Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons program years earlier—in return for a guarantee from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia to respect its borders and its sovereignty. Two of the three larger countries had kept that promise.
* * *
We touched down in fog-shrouded Munich on Friday night, February 6, 2015, and while Finnegan and I rode in the motorcade toward the Westin Grand hotel on the dark, amber-lit, snow-dusted streets, I reflected on what had to be done in my brief visit to the city. I had been threading the very narrow eye of a needle for the past year in the Ukraine crisis. President Obama’s sympathies were all with Ukraine, but he was not going to allow this regional conflict to escalate into a hot war with Russia. Barack was a student of modern world history, and an incisive one. He was always on guard against the age-old mistake of allowing smaller brush fires to be unwittingly fed until they had become terrifying conflagrations beyond anyone’s control. And he was keenly aware that the biggest unforced errors the United States had made after World War II were not a result of too much restraint, but too little. He would caution me sometimes about overpromising to the new Ukrainian government. “We’re not going to send in the Eighty-second Airborne, Joe. They have to understand that.” The president and I agreed that we could and should convince our European allies to support and extend serious economic sanctions against Russia. But economic sanctions were as far as the United States and its allies in Europe would go.
President Obama was always mindful of the concerns of the Big Four in Europe—Britain, Germany, France, and Italy—whose leaders he was in touch with constantly. The senior member of the quartet, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, was on record with her worry about “a confrontation [in Ukraine] which risks spiraling out of control.” She and the others were even more worried about the political backlash they would face at home when the economic sanctions and embargoes on Russia started to pinch their own business communities. And none of them were hot to spend their political capital to save an emerging democracy whose leaders had exhibited a penchant for corruption, self-dealing, and self-destructive behavior. I was probably swayed in my own thinking by my frequent contacts with the leaders of our more recent allies in Europe—in Poland, Romania, the Baltic states, the Balkans. Putin’s move in Ukraine felt like the canary in the coal mine to them. They were afraid that if the West didn’t stand firm there, Putin might start carving off pieces of their territory near the Russian border. Or more.
It was almost ten at night when Finnegan and the staff and I finally settled into our rooms at the Westin, but I wasn’t ready to sleep. I looked over the briefing materials again and started gaming out the next few days. I was going to be giving a speech at the Munich conference Saturday afternoon and had more than half a dozen formal meetings scheduled that weekend. The most important was a trilateral talk just before noon on Saturday with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and Chancellor Merkel. Merkel and French president François Hollande were in the middle of a tense negotiation with Putin about defining and implementing a new and improved version of the shaky Minsk cease-fire. Merkel had a phone call with Putin scheduled for the next day, so I wanted to be there at Poroshenko’s side in our three-way meeting to make sure Merkel understood that the United States remained ready to stand tough for him and his nation’s borders. But before any of that, I wanted to make sure to be in the audience for Merkel’s own address to the security conference. So that was the first t
hing up on my public calendar—less than ten hours away.
The chancellor was strong in her speech that next morning. Ukraine was “seeing both its territorial integrity and sovereignty disregarded,” she said. “International law is being violated.” But she was not strong enough for my taste; the passive voice weakened her statement. And I was disappointed when, after her speech, she flatly refused to consider providing any real weaponry to Ukraine’s overmatched military. “The progress that Ukraine needs cannot be achieved by more weapons,” she said. She seemed to have the sympathy of the crowd on that point.
I left the Merkel event and told my staff we had to revise my own remarks. My words needed to be as direct and declarative as possible. We had less than four hours to fix the speech, and I had to do the meeting with Merkel and Poroshenko first. I instructed my team to start un-lawyering the language of the speech. I wanted them to make absolutely sure that the plain meaning could not be missed, and told them I would be back to help with rewrites as soon as I could.
The room for the meeting with President Poroshenko and Chancellor Merkel was nothing fancy. We sat at a relatively small table in the corner of a conference room, which meant it was an intimate talk. Poroshenko seemed relieved I was there. He knew I was committed to Ukraine’s success for its own sake and also as a proof to Russia of European resolve. I thought the outcome of the Ukraine crisis would set the tone for central and eastern Europe for decades, for good or for ill. I had been hard on Poroshenko since his election nine months earlier. I’d made it clear to him that he could not afford to give the Europeans any excuse for walking away from the sanctions regime against Russia. He had to continue to fight the elements of corruption that were embedded in the political culture of Ukraine’s Soviet and post-Soviet governance—both in Yatsenyuk’s rival party and in Poroshenko’s own. But the Ukrainian president also knew I had gone to bat for him to get aid packages from the International Monetary Fund and loan guarantees from the United States. That I had been pushing hard at the Principals Committee meetings to provide training for his military, and had already been able to get him nonlethal equipment like the special radars Ukraine’s military needed to identify the location of Russian mortars. Poroshenko could not have missed my own sense of urgency where the future of Ukraine was concerned.
Poroshenko knew he was in a much stronger position with Merkel as well. Her relationship with Putin had soured over his actions in Ukraine in recent months. Putin was the bad actor here, the chancellor assured Poroshenko at our meeting that day, but she nonetheless pressed him, as she had us, to construct some sort of “off-ramp” for Putin. She was looking for concessions from the Ukrainian president she could take to Putin the next day. She believed the Russian leader needed to be able to walk away and claim some victory. She wasn’t specific, but she kept asking Poroshenko to find something he could put on the negotiating table. The term she used for what Putin needed was a “face-saving” way out.
“We can’t blame the victim here,” I said, nodding at Poroshenko. I pointed out that Putin had not fulfilled any of his commitments under the original Minsk agreement, and Putin had to be held accountable for that failure. The Ukrainian leader could offer to give more local autonomy to the different regions, or let Russian be a coequal official language in the easternmost oblasts, or withdraw his heavy artillery from the front lines, but what should come first was action from Putin. What should come first was Putin withdrawing his tanks and his soldiers and Putin handing control of the border back to Ukraine. The restoration of Ukraine’s border had to come before President Poroshenko conceded anything. Merkel seemed frustrated with me by the time the meeting broke up.
I found myself with very little time remaining to rewrite my speech—a single hour while I ate lunch and another spare half hour after that. I was scheduled to take the podium at three o’clock that afternoon, and at five after three I was still dictating reworked passages to my speechwriter. Russia sought to keep secret its little green men and the multiple tanks that they’ve given the separatists. But we have given you all incontrovertible proof that they exist. You’ve seen the pictures. The staff’s collective blood pressure was already rising into the red zone by ten after three, when I was still dictating phrases. But I had to get it right. It is not the objective of the United States of America to collapse or weaken the Russian economy. That is not our objective. But President Putin has to make a simple, stark choice: get out of Ukraine or face continued isolation and growing economic costs at home. What was fifteen minutes in the grand scheme? What was twenty minutes? Twenty-five?
“Ladies and gentlemen, as the chairman said earlier today, I did stand here six years ago and in the first major foreign policy address of our administration, I spoke about the ‘reset,’” I began, thirty-two minutes behind schedule. The speech only ran twenty-eight minutes. I was declarative and I was direct. “America and Europe are being tested,” I said. “President Putin has to understand that, as he has changed, so has our focus. We have moved from resetting this important relationship to reasserting the fundamental bedrock principles on which European freedom and stability rest. And I’ll say it again: inviolate borders, no spheres of influence, the sovereign right to choose your own alliances. I cannot repeat that often enough.… We need to remain resolute and united in our support of Ukraine, as the chancellor said this morning. What happens there will resonate well beyond Ukraine. It matters to all—not just in Europe, but around the world—all who may be subject to aggression.”
I came as close as I could to telling our NATO allies that it was our moral duty to provide weapons to Ukraine. The Ukrainians had shown real courage, and though they were unlikely to stop any determined Russian military aggression, I believed they deserved to be able to try to defend themselves. “Too many times President Putin has promised peace, and delivered tanks, troops, and weapons. So we will continue to provide Ukraine with security assistance, not to encourage war but to allow Ukraine to defend itself. Let me be clear: we do not believe there is a military solution in Ukraine. But let me be equally clear: we do not believe Russia has the right to do what they’re doing. We believe we should attempt an honorable peace. But we also believe the Ukrainian people have a right to defend themselves.”
I paused for a brief moment, and let the applause register on every policy maker in the room. I was hoping the applause would equal resolve.
When the speech was over, I felt like I had accomplished what I had set out to, especially after John McCain, who was leading the United States congressional delegation at Munich, told me he thought it was the best speech he had ever heard me give. His support mattered to me personally, and it mattered institutionally. Congress controlled the purse strings. If we needed to get weapons to Ukraine, Congress would have to appropriate the money to do so. And there seemed to be growing bipartisan support. Even Senator Ted Cruz, who rarely agreed with anything I had to say, agreed with me about providing support to beleaguered Ukrainian fighters. As did Republican senator Lindsey Graham. Chancellor Merkel “can’t see how arming people who are willing to fight and die for their freedom makes things better,” Lindsey Graham told reporters in Munich. “I do.”
* * *
It had snowed in Munich early Sunday morning, and the temperature never rose above the freezing mark, so the ground crunched under our feet as my granddaughter Finnegan and I approached the entrance gate near a looming guard tower that afternoon. There was a ninety-five-year-old man at the gate, sitting in his wheelchair, waiting to greet us. I had spent the early part of that day reassuring leaders of a few of our allies in eastern Europe, advising the president of Montenegro on how he might improve his country’s chances for an invitation to join NATO, and trying to convince the leader of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq to help the new Iraqi president, Haider al-Abadi, in his effort to push ISIL out of their country. Abadi was in Munich looking for help from all quarters, and I spent a full hour with him to offer some much-needed encouragement. He was a
little down, and for good reason. When the conference switched topics from Ukraine to ISIL at the end of the first day, one reporter noted, “room clears. No crowd for al-Abadi. Not a good sign.” I promised him I was still there for him and would continue to be.
By that Sunday afternoon my official duties for the week were finally behind me, but not my duty as Pop. And I did not take my job as grandfather any less seriously than I did my job as vice president. The last stop in Germany was a guided tour for Finnegan and me of the World War II–era concentration camp at Dachau, a field trip that had become another Biden family tradition. This was a place I felt all my children and grandchildren needed to experience. I had taken Beau and Hunter and Ashley on separate trips to Dachau when they were teenagers, and Finnegan was now of age, too.
My insistence on taking my children and grandchildren to see Dachau had to do with my own father, who used to talk about the horrors of the Holocaust at the dinner table when I was a kid. The discussions were never long, and he didn’t preach at us or make any big speeches about Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews in Germany, but he imparted real wisdom. Dad would remind us that a campaign of that size could not have been waged in secret. The idea that the German people did not know this was happening defied logic. Humans were capable of incredible cruelty, our father wanted me, my sister, and my brothers to understand. And just as dangerous, he made us see, human beings were also capable of looking the other way and remaining silent when awful things were happening all around them.
The man in the wheelchair, Max Mannheimer, had been a prisoner at Dachau and other concentration camps when he was a young man. He and one brother had survived, but his wife, his parents, his sisters, and another brother had all been murdered. I wanted Finnegan to hear his personal story. I had also given her some reading material in preparation for the trip. Dachau was the first concentration camp put into operation by the Nazis, in 1933. The first prisoners there were Hitler’s political opponents—German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists. Then came Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, and other people the Nazis deemed “undesirable.” In the late 1930s the Nazis began to fill the camp with Jews. Almost thirty thousand prisoners were worked to death or murdered at Dachau between 1940 and 1945. Nobody can say for sure how many were killed at Dachau in the years before that. I assigned Finnegan an essay that included the following poem by Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor who was thrown into a German concentration camp at the end of the war.