Washington has been dangling Zelensky as Putin bait, but Ukraine’s president has Biden by the budget.

(Originally published Dec. 23 in “What in the World“) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may be struggling to push Russian invaders out of his country, but he has definitely conquered Washington, D.C.

His hero’s welcome by the U.S. Congress and President Joe Biden virtually assures

him of billions of dollars in continued financing and weapons to fend off the forces of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Zelensky hasn’t yet managed to convince Biden to give him all the weapons he wants. Battle tanks, attack drones, fighter jets and long-range missiles remain beyond his reach. But if the war so far is any guide, he’ll eventually get those, too.

Much seems to depend on who really controls the relationship between Zelensky and Biden. Biden might seem to have the inherent advantage, being the head of the world’s most powerful nation and all, finger on the button and hands on the purse-strings. But Biden has hitched himself to desperate and dangerous ally, Zelensky: the head of a nation facing annihilation by America’s arch-rival. Russia is a nuclear power headed by a dictator who also recognizes defeat as his own likely annihilation, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden may have power, therefore, but Zelensky has a potent combination of leverage and initiative.

Biden’s strategy seems to have been to coax Russia into a sort of Vietnam in reverse: lure Putin into what experts said even Putin knew is an impossible quagmire and then use it to catalyze Putin’s downfall. Recall that the White House adopted a chicken little ploy during Putin’s January buildup. As he amassed troops on Ukraine’s border in what some at the time dismissed as a feint to win concessions from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, the White House loudly decried each move as a prelude to invasion. Critics at the time—and even Putin—said that Washington was essentially calling Putin’s bluff, and goading him to invade by pushing Putin into a corner where failing to invade once the U.S. refused to negotiate would look like he had backed down.

The alternative view was that Putin’s demands and offers to negotiate were just a stalling tactic, that his aim all along was the complete subjugation of Ukraine and perhaps even more—to regain a foothold in the former Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe.

History will judge. What we know is that Putin ended up launching a blitzkrieg with ground forces seemingly unprepared for the job and hobbled by the mysterious absence of meaningful air support. This suggests Russia’s wasn’t as prepared for invasion as feared. Some analysts speculated that Putin’s real aims were more limited: to secure his 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia’s only warm-water port, Sevastopol, by establishing a land bridge across the pro-Russian enclaves of Donestsk and Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Having successfully lured Putin into the Ukrainian tar pit, Washington’s aim has since seemed to be to keep him bogged down there. It’s a risky balance: push too softly and Russia wins Ukraine; push too hard and end up in direct, nuclear conflict with Russia—World War III. Staying in the middle has meant sacrificing Ukraine by giving it only as much support as it needs to keep victory beyond Russia’s reach without giving it so much support that Russia is faced with defeat.

This strategy may be belied by the Biden Administration’s oft-repeated promise that America will support Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” but not “whatever it takes.” The West, as Putin himself has quipped, is only willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

Time is thus also on Russia’s side. Even as the war and sanctions steadily bleed Putin’s public support and treasury, support in the West for the war’s costs is also eroding.

And then there’s Zelensky, who hasn’t proved as pliant a puppet as Washington might have liked. Remember that it was in exchange for Javelin anti-tank missiles that Zelensky submitted to extortion by former President Donald Trump to investigate Biden’s son Hunter. Borrowing Biden’s megaphone strategy, Zelensky has been very vocal about the shortcomings of U.S. and NATO aid. He has continually escalated his requests for more and more sophisticated weaponry, which he has won after initial refusals.

U.S. officials say they eventually gave into Zelensky because the nature of the war changed, and they seemed vital to Ukraine’s survival. But they also seem to take place only once the war has ground into a stalemate.

The first concessions came in May. After Russia managed to establish a land bridge to Crimea with the conquest of Mariupol, the war settled into a stalemate marked by dueling artillery. Public interest waned and pundits, even The New York Times, began calling for a negotiated settlement. It was then that the Biden Administration began allowing shipments of M177 howitzers to Ukraine.

By the end of the month, Biden had also reversed his refusal to supply Ukraine with M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars. That was such a significant about-face that Biden submitted an op-ed explaining his decision to The Times. Biden explained that the U.S. wasn’t “encouraging or enabling” Ukraine to attack beyond its borders.

Biden also said Zelensky had promised it wouldn’t use the Himars to attack targets inside Russia. Just in case, Biden held back the kind of longer-range missiles that could reach it, the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, or Atacms and even rigged Ukraine’s Himars so they couldn’t fire Atacms obtained elsewhere. The Himars helped Ukraine break the stalemate and gain a battlefield edge, resulting in September’s liberation of Kherson and the surprise advance in Kharkiv.

But by November as winter started to set in, both sides were again seemingly locked in a battle of diminishing artillery. Russia has been crippling Ukraine’s heating, power and water supplies by lobbing retro-fitted cruise missiles, cheap Iranian drones and North Korean shells. In early December, Ukraine retaliated with another surprise attack, this with homemade drones on targets inside Russia.

Whether the drone attacks were Zelensky’s way of forcing Washington’s hand or a carefully staged, Pentagon-approved probe of Russia’s reaction, we may never know. What we do know is that, a week later, Biden had green-lighted Ukraine’s request for Patriot missiles.

A week later, Zelensky stood before Congress, delivering an address hindered less by his halting English than by the standing ovations U.S. lawmakers gave him after almost every sentence.

So, is Zelensky a hapless pawn in a larger geopolitical chess match between Biden and Putin? Or is he the puppeteer, pulling whichever of Biden’s strings he needs for his nation’s survival? Again, history will judge.

Zelensky is, by the way, navigating a similar relationship with Europe, which is now confronting a similar problem of having given so many weapons to Ukraine that it faces urgent shortages of its own.

But having wheedled and cajoled so much out of the U.S., Zelensky certainly has momentum on his side. The U.S. has now committed $858 billion to defending it and replenishing its own arsenals to counter the twin threat posed by Russia and China. For the U.S., fears of escalation may be offset by the issue of sunk costs.