WASHINGTON DC – Former US President Joe Biden’s top national security aide on Europe on Monday urged the White House to respond to Russia’s latest attacks in Ukraine by action, not words only.
“Condemning Russia’s violence without doing anything about it simply begets more violence,” Ambassador Michael Carpenter, who served as Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council under the Biden White House, told Kyiv Post’s Washington correspondent.
While President Donald Trump recently began publicly lambasting the Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin over bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones - most recently on Sunday by calling Putin “crazy” , he has stopped short of taking concrete actions that Western allies and Ukraine say are necessary to pressure Russia into serious negotiations, such as imposing fresh sanctions.
Carpenter, who served as US Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe under the previous administration said that Vladimir Putin’s goal in continued attacks in Ukraine “has always been maximalist, to subjugate” the war-torn country.
“Once you accept that core reality, then everything else is essentially noise: in other words, he will keep attacking until he is stopped,” he said.
The Ukrainian air force said Monday that Russian forces had overnight launched 355 attack drones and nine cruise missiles. The night before, Putin’s military sent a total of 300 attack drones and 70 missiles targeting capital Kyiv among other cities, killing at least 13 people.
The move came as Ukraine and Russia swapped hundreds of prisoners over the weekend as result of peace talks in Istanbul which took place a week ago.
In the meantime, Carpenter told Kyiv Post that the Istanbul meeting was “frankly just the illusion of a negotiation to buy time and keep the US from applying sanctions.”
Trump and Putin spoke by phone last Monday, after which European officials accused the White House of handing Putin a “win” by hinting that Washington would back out of diplomatic negotiations.
Trump also refused to apply fresh sanctions on Russia to ramp up pressure on Putin to take negotiations seriously.