Zelensky’s speech carries weight beyond the applause he received

Everyone expected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give a rousing speech to the joint session of Congress. He did not disappoint. He appealed directly to the American people. He gave them a history lesson, ranging from the Battle of the Bulge to 9/11. He pointed to the many parallels between the war to defend his country and America’s wars for freedom. And, as he has done many times before, he asserted that Ukraine’s war was not his country’s alone but, rather, a war to protect the Free World from the predations of autocrats, wherever they were to be found. 

Zelensky is no Winston Churchill. Unlike the great British statesman, who electrified his congressional audience at a joint session on Dec. 26, 1941, in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Zelensky’s English is halting, his elocution uneven. No matter. The bipartisan, bicameral audience continually rose to its feet to give prolonged applause. Only extreme right-wing, churlish isolationists such as Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sat on their hands throughout the speech. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has called Zelensky a thug and said she believes he is corrupt, graced the House chamber by not attending the session at all. 

What matters far more than applause, however, is the extent to which the United States will continue to support Ukraine with funds and materiel. Washington sets the standard for the allies and partners who are assisting Kyiv, many of which are beginning to feel the budgetary strains that their support is aggravating. 

Zelensky is well aware of those strains, not only the tension surrounding $45 billion that hangs on the successful passage of the omnibus spending bill, but of the challenges to obtaining additional aid in the new year. He also recognizes the likely hardships Europeans will face now that winter is upon them. 

Yet, he is equally cognizant that developments over the next several months could determine the outcome of the war. Russian forces are digging in to fight World War I-type trench warfare so as to give Vladimir Putin time to reconstitute his forces over the next two years, by which time a potentially new administration in Washington might be less inclined to support Kyiv. Indeed, Zelensky, like all former citizens of the Soviet Union, surely is aware that although Adolf Hitler reached the gates of Stalingrad in September 1942, in less than three years a reconstituted Soviet force had marched victoriously into Berlin. Without ongoing American and allied support, Russian forces might yet march into Kyiv.

With this somber sense of history, Zelensky again asked the Congress for tanks and aircraft. He pointedly refuted the administration’s barely concealed whispers that it would take too long for his forces to train in order to employ heavy American armor effectively.

After months of administration indecision, President Biden finally announced that the United States will send Patriots to Ukraine. The administration had dawdled, in part, for fear of Russian retaliation, and partly because it argued — as it has continued to argue in the case of tanks and aircraft — that it would take months to train Ukrainians to operate the Patriot missile system. In reality, Ukrainian troops have demonstrated that they train at a far faster rate than Americans had projected. No doubt, they will disprove American skeptics again when they receive the Patriots. 

At present, Washington is transferring only one Patriot battery to Kyiv; even that single battery, however, will enhance Ukraine’s long-range air and missile defenses. Ukraine needs more than just one battery, however, and it is difficult to understand why Washington can ship just one battery and not several more. Moreover, as with the HIMARS mobile rocket system, which also took the administration some time to send to Kyiv, had Ukraine obtained Patriots many months ago, its forces certainly would have been trained and positioned to employ them effectively to support the summer and fall offensives that recovered more than half of once Russian-occupied territory.

There can be little doubt that when the 118th Congress is seated on Jan. 3, 2023, isolationist Republicans in the House will do their utmost to block any further assistance to Ukraine. Nevertheless, as the size and composition of Zelensky’s bipartisan audience made abundantly clear, Ukraine has the congressional votes to continue to receive the funds and equipment it desperately needs throughout the upcoming year. Enough senators and House members recognize that, as Churchill put it in that December 1941 speech, “Pestilences may break out in the Old World, which carry their destructive ravages into the New World, from which, once they are afoot, the New World cannot escape.” 

It is high time the Biden administration overcame its fears, ceased to deter itself, and gave Zelensky far more of what he is seeking — for the sake of the New World as well as the Old. Should it do so, the Ukrainian president’s speech will have rendered far more meaningful the applause, ovations and shouts of support that he deservedly received. 

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was under secretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy under secretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.