Ukraine's invasion of Russia may not turn the tide, but Biden needs to support it with arms.

Once again, though, he's dithering.

Ukraine’s successful invasion of Russia is surely of some significance. At a minimum, it has lifted morale in Ukraine.

On the other hand, the invasion doesn’t magically change the fundamentals of the war, including Russia’s huge manpower advantage. Nor does the invasion seem to have slowed Russia’s advances in Ukraine. In fact, Russia reportedly is closing in on the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region — a city said to be a key logistical hub, the capture of which could lead to additional advances.

Will Russia change its approach to the war in response to Ukraine’s success in the Kursk region? Will it divert forces to reverse that success? Only Putin knows the answers, and even he may not be certain.

Sergei Markov, whom the Washington Post describes as a “pro-Kremlin analyst,” says that Ukraine’s capture of small villages in the Kursk region will not worry Moscow. On the other hand, he acknowledges that the capture of Kursk city “would be a very big loss” that could force Putin to change his approach. That sounds plausible.

One potentially significant effect of the invasion is that it changes the nature of those doing the fighting for Russia. In hotly contested parts of Ukraine, it’s professional soldiers who are in the lead. But in the Kursk of Russia it’s young conscripts who suddenly have been forced into combat (or capitulation).

That’s because Putin and his advisers calculated that this was not likely to be a battleground. Therefore it seemed safe, militarily, to rely on conscripts to “defend” Russia. Doing so would keep them out of harm’s way and thus help maintain public support for the war.

But with conscripts doing the fighting and dying (or being captured), the war is likely to become less popular in Russia. So the invasion creates a double whammy for Putin. Russians don’t like the fact that their homeland has been invaded and don’t like it that their conscripted sons are dying in the process.

How much does this matter, though? Putin certainly wants public support for the war to remain strong, but Russia isn’t a democracy. Thus, it’s far from clear that an erosion of public support would influence his conduct.

What is clear, at least to me, is that the U.S. should provide the arms Ukraine needs to continue its invasion. The invasion may not be a game-changer, but it provides reason to hope that Ukraine’s position, which has been eroding lately, will improve — perhaps even to the point that it will be possible to negotiate a settlement that doesn’t amount to capitulation.

Yet, Joe Biden, as has been the case throughout the conflict, is waffling. According to this report, the administration is “still debating whether to help Kyiv’s forces hold and perhaps even expand the. . .territory they now occupy in [Russia].”

The administration reportedly is miffed that it wasn’t told in advance about the decision to invade Russia and claims it’s uncertain about what Ukraine is trying to do. (Is there any mystery about Ukraine’s broad objectives? I don’t think so.)

The real reason why the administration hasn’t moved to help Ukraine with its invasion is fear of Russia’s response. That same fear has caused Biden to be painfully slow off the mark throughout the war. Tom Cotton documented that slowness, and its deadly consequences, here.

Putin has all he can handle subduing eastern Ukraine. Accordingly, throughout the conflict the evidence has been that Putin, for all his talk, is not about to risk a direct confrontation with NATO and/or the U.S. over our aid to Ukraine.

Now that Biden won’t be the Democrats’ standard bearer, even the Washington Post is presenting criticism of the (nominal) president’s reluctance to give Ukraine what it needs to counter the Russians:

Ukraine’s punch through Russian defenses in the first foreign invasion since World War II exposed Russia’s military flaws and laid bare Moscow’s apparently illusory red lines.

Now some are again questioning the centerpiece of Washington’s Ukraine strategy: a slow, calibrated supply of weapons to Ukraine to avoid escalating tensions with Russia that critics argue has dashed Kyiv’s chances of driving Russia out and resulted in a grinding war of attrition with massive casualties. . . .

Ukraine’s attacks have repeatedly crossed ostensible red lines: sinking Russia’s Black Sea flagship, Moskva; the 2022 Crimea Bridge blast; Storm Shadow missile attacks on the fleet headquarters in Sevastopol; the 2023 drone attacks on the Kremlin and Moscow; the assassinations of propagandists on Russian territory; and attacks on strategic air bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine.

The Western hardware being used by Ukrainian forces, HIMARS, tanks, ATACMS and F-16s, were all once red lines, too. . . .

Boris Bondarev, a Geneva-based former Russian diplomat who resigned in 2022 to protest the war, said in an interview that Washington’s fear of triggering a direct military conflict with Russia had crippled the U.S. response, leaving its goals in the war unclear and projecting American weakness to Putin and other global adversaries.

“When you put your enemy’s red lines, so to speak, as the crucial factor of your own strategy, you will always be on the losing side,” he said.

Nobody projects American weakness quite like Joe Biden, though I expect that Kamala Harris, if elected, will be his equal. The brave Ukrainians deserve a more staunch, more committed ally.