Not even the Biden administration was so dense as to believe that recovering majority Russian-speaking territory for Ukraine was worth a nuclear war. From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:
History is being rewritten as a former senior official from the Biden Administration counterfactually claims that the US never wanted to restore Ukraine’s borders.
Time Magazine claimed late last month that the Biden Administration “never” sought to help Ukraine recapture all of its lost territory from Russia, citing Joe Biden’s former Senior Director for Russia and Central Asia at the National Security Council Eric Green as the authority on the matter. According to him, “We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters. That was not going to be a success story ultimately.” It’s factually untrue that the US never wanted to restore Ukraine’s borders.
The public deserves to know what the initial goal was after new Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Megyn Kelly in an interview that the former administration “somehow led people to believe that Ukraine would be able not just to defeat Russia but destroy them, push them all the way back to what the world looked like in 2012 or 2014, before the Russians took Crimea and the like.” Instead of that, Rubio said that “Ukraine is being destroyed and losing more and more territory”, hence the need to end the conflict
Biden’s first speech after the start of Russia’s special operation on 24 February 2022 condemned “changing borders by force” and accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of wanting to “reestablish the former Soviet Union.” The emergency NATO Summit that was held the day after saw them call on Russia “to withdraw all its forces from Ukraine” and reaffirmed “unwavering support for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders”.
On that same day, former State Department spokesman Ned Price declared that “We will not falter in our resolute support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and demanded that Putin “order the withdrawal of his forces from Ukraine”. One day later on 26 February, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken disclosed that he authorized “an unprecedented third Presidential Drawdown of up to $350 million (in emergency military aid) for immediate support to Ukraine’s defense” at Biden’s behest.”
