Ukraine has asked NATO leadership to have member nations, including the US, send military trainers to Ukraine to help train 150,000 new recruits into the Ukrainian armed forces. The US is exceedingly reluctant.

So far the United States has said no, but General Charles Q Brown Jr, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that a NATO deployment of trainers appeared inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.

To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes from another venue: over time, Ukrainians are all enslaved.

Worse,

For now, he [Brown] said, an effort inside Ukraine would put “a bunch of NATO trainers at risk” and would most likely mean deciding whether to use precious air defenses to protect the trainers instead of critical Ukrainian infrastructure near the battlefield.

Imagine that—soldiers in a war zone might be in harm’s way. But we’ll only protect selected ones. Brown also is ignoring the simple fact that critical Ukrainian infrastructure extends throughout Ukraine. And so does the battlefield, as the barbarian’s targeting by missiles, rockets, drones, even glide bombs, all launched from the Biden-created Sanctuary Russia, make clear.

Is this another example of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden cynically slow-walking aid to Ukraine? Or is this Biden and his too-woke military advisors being deeply chicken…t?

Former President Donald Trump (R) has been repeatedly and over the long term caviled for his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him brilliant, an effective leader, more. Even as he was extolling the skills (not the virtues, as the intrinsically mendacious press wants you to believe), though, Trump was busily arming Ukraine with lethal weapons after the prior administration, that of Progressive-Democrat President Barack Obama had withheld lethal weapons, telling the Ukrainians they should be happy to make do with blankets and MREs.

A subset of the Trump-delivered lethal weapons, antitank Javelins, proved decisive in the Ukrainian defeat of the barbarian’s original onslaught out of Belorussia toward Kyiv and out of Russia into Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts, ultimately pushing the barbarian back out of Ukraine’s Kyiv Oblast altogether and most of Kharkiv Oblast.

Now we have Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden. He insists that no weapon the US transfers are permitted to be used against Russian territory. As The Wall Street Journal put it in its Thursday editorial,

President Biden’s strategy, even after a cash infusion from Congress, looks like a plan for Ukraine to lose as slowly as possible.

After all, the outcome of Biden’s limits (I haven’t approached Biden’s cynical slow-walking the delivery of those weapons he will permit be transferred to Ukraine) is succinctly described by the WSJ‘s editors.

The President has precluded Ukraine from using American weapons to hit sovereign Russian territory. The practical effect of this is to offer the Russian military a safe haven. The Russians can build up troops, supplies and weapons near Ukraine. Mr. Putin can then deploy scarce defensive systems elsewhere, confident anything inside Russia is safe, courtesy of Mr Biden’s preconditions.

Even as Biden excoriates Putin, trying to show his own bona fides, he has actively created the invader barbarian as a sanctuary nation within which no attacks will be permitted.

Who was the one willing to confront the barbarian, and took concrete steps to do so, and who is the one actively protecting the barbarian, and taking concrete steps to further that protection?