They may not be the cracks in Western intent that Vladimir Putin has long been banking on, but they do suggest where he should look.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Adolescent complaints by Joe Biden's National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, about the ungratefulness of Ukraine for arms and equipment supplied diminish the core principle at stake in this unprovoked war.
And, by presaging a certain public fatigue, their comments offer a morale boost to the embattled Russian despot suggesting he can yet outlast Western generosity.
Sullivan was careful to avoid a direct rebuke of Volodymyr Zelenskyy but his message was plain enough.
"I think the American people do deserve a degree of gratitude from the United States government for their willingness to step up and from the rest of the world as well," the Biden aide told a live event on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The oafish Wallace recalled his umbrage at demands made for arms earlier in the war.
"You know, we're not Amazon," he wise-cracked.
"I told them that last year, when I drove 11 hours to be given a list ... whether we like it or not, people want to see gratitude."
MORE MARK KENNY:
Such abject pleadings hint that democracies are less uniformly resolved to staying the course than previously stated and may now start weighing their costs against domestic priorities and even hurt feelings.
The ability of smaller sovereign state to resist larger invaders, it transpires, depends as much on how obsequious they are for help as it does the geo-strategic interests of global peace and the moral weight of human life.
Besides, Zelenskyy's unvarnished insistence on ever-more Western arms is no parlour game.
He is trying to save Ukrainian lives, and save his country from obliteration. Politeness doesn't come into it.
In truth, the West's performance throughout the war has been marked by tardiness, even if Zelenskyy's requests have mostly been accepted as strategically valid.
Economic sanctions on Russian oligarchs, banks and other companies were slow, patchy, deliberately piecemeal.
Military supplies have flowed, but only in fits and starts.
Aircraft, missile defence systems, Himar surface-to-surface rockets, battle tanks, and artillery, have all been supplied but not as fast as would have been tactically optimal.
Recall the months of angst over American, German and British tanks.
Yet Zelenskyy has stayed positive.
On any measure, he has proved to be a superb diplomat, a skilled international networker, and an inspirational president - his kaki clobber serving as a constant reminder that here is a wartime leader, lest anyone forget.
Despite putting noses out of joint with his frontal criticism of NATO dithering, he left the Lithuanian capital on Thursday with a solid promise of Ukraine's membership of NATO once the war is over.
That unanimous embrace was unthinkable before Putin's invasion precisely because it would bring NATO right to Moscow's border. Indeed, so sensitive was that prospect that it was also Putin's casus belli - the main justification for his "special military operation".
The scale of Putin's miscalculation is only now becoming clear. He judged the West to be too feeble and individual states too self-interested to respond to his invasion. He assessed NATO to be in decline, and he believed Ukraine would quickly fold.
What he got instead was a rejuvenated and expanded NATO with Finland, Sweden included and an utterly defiant Ukraine to follow. This is the biggest own goal since Hitler's Operation Barbarossa.
But for Ukraine, supplying a war like it is an international telethon has its limits which is why Zelenskyy wants the US to provide defence materiel over a fixed time-frame as it does with Israel.
A Congressional Research Service paper titled US Foreign Aid to Israel updated in March, positions Israel as "the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II".
It lists among its reasons for this extraordinary generosity, Israel's "shared strategic goals in the Middle East" and "a mutual avowed commitment to democratic values".
Perhaps Sullivan should focus on the "gratitude" this buys.
"To date, the United States has provided Israel $158 billion ... in bilateral assistance and missile defence funding," it says.
"At present, almost all US bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance."
Notably, Israel itself has refused to share with Ukraine its world-best Iron Dome missile defence system.
As Bibi Netanyahu's far-right government proceeds to clip the wings of its Supreme Court, and fast tracks settlements in the occupied West Bank, American tut-tutting is water off a duck's back.
Amid human rights abuses and escalating military aggression, Israel defies international opinion, ignores UN resolutions, and makes statements like that of its Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who said in March, "there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language".
The resonance with Putin's claims about Ukraine - that it is not a real country - is staggering.
Biden, at least, frames the attack on Ukraine in broad existential terms.
"This fight is not only a fight for future Ukraine, it's about sovereignty, security, and freedom itself ... think about what happened if we didn't do anything," he said from Finland before heading home.
Boiled down, Biden is saying, the West's commitment to Russia's defeat, can only go one way if the West itself is to survive.
More bluntly, Ukraine's gratitude has nothing to do with it.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
