Is Ukraine growing frustrated with Biden?

Another perfect call?
Joe Biden spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday. The White House read of the phone call suggested an unremarkable conversation. According to the official summary, Biden reaffirmed US commitments to Ukraine, noted previous support America had offered and discussed with Zelensky efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the present crisis.

A Ukrainian official’s account of the call paints a very different picture. CNN reports that, according to the senior official, the call “did not go well.” They described a “long and frank” conversation in which Zelensky and Biden found themselves at odds with…

Another perfect call?

Joe Biden spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday. The White House read of the phone call suggested an unremarkable conversation. According to the official summary, Biden reaffirmed US commitments to Ukraine, noted previous support America had offered and discussed with Zelensky efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the present crisis.

A Ukrainian official’s account of the call paints a very different picture. CNN reports that, according to the senior official, the call “did not go well.” They described a “long and frank” conversation in which Zelensky and Biden found themselves at odds with one another over the threat of imminent invasion. According to the CNN story, Biden “warned his Ukrainian counterpart that a Russian attack may be imminent, saying that an invasion was now virtually certain, once the ground had frozen later in February, according to the official.” Zelensky reportedly responded by asking his counterpart to “calm the messaging down.”

The administration pushback against this account was swift and strong. National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said “anonymous sources are ‘leaking’ falsehoods” and claimed that “President Biden said that there is a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February. He has said this publicly… Reports of anything more or different than that are completely false.”

(What is it with American presidents and less-than-perfect phone calls to Zelensky?)

Even if CNN’s source over-egged their account of the call, tensions between Ukraine and the US are no secret. The Ukrainian government was more than a little frustrated by Biden’s inelegant freestyling on the possibility of a Russian invasion in his recent press conference. That frustration deepened a few days later when the US ordered diplomats’ families to leave Kiev, a move Ukrainian officials saw to be an overreaction.

Ukraine isn’t the only country eager for the Biden administration to cool its talk of the risk of invasion. While the UK government has adopted at least as urgent a tone as Washington, both France and Germany are taking a noticeably cooler approach.

The question is whether or not these differences are just tactical or run deeper. We will soon find out. Emmanuel Macron is talking to Vladimir Putin today. Four-way Normandy Format talks between France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia continue. The US has called for a UN Security Council meeting on Monday. Perhaps this is a case of good cop/bad cop, or perhaps Western differences on Ukraine are about to prove a serious strain on relations between the US and some of its closest allies. Either way, the standoff is easily Biden’s biggest diplomatic test yet.

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The Covid hawks swoop

The work of New York Times journalist David Leonhardt has helped make pandemic life a little less intolerable in a Covid-cautious city like Washington. In his widely read morning newsletter, Leonhardt has patiently talked neurotic readers through a sensible assessment of the dangers of Covid, luring them out of self-imposed lockdowns with stat-heavy, reasonable explainers on everything from the limited dangers of Covid to children to the damage done by school closures and the bias towards pessimism in so much pandemic coverage.

Given his sizable audience, it’s not too much to say that without Leonhardt, conventional wisdom on Covid in liberal America would be even more hawkish.

And so, perhaps inevitably, the public health blob now has him in their sights. And Politico is here to help them take him down. In a story titled “The NYT’s polarizing pundit,” Joanne Kenen confirms Leonhardt’s influence. Indeed, we learn that his readers include Joe Biden. But she then amplifies an absurd attack from a small group of public health experts who deliver a one-two punch of Covid cautiousness and woke accusations of “privilege.”

“Critics also say that for all his focus on inequality, he overlooks that for poor people, if they don’t have great insurance and paid sick leave, even mild to moderate disease can be an economic calamity,” writes Kenen, getting things back to front. The real privilege is the ability to sit at home, mainlining disaster-porn Covid journalism, with no real regard for who is hit hardest by lockdowns, school closures and social distancing measures.

As Leonhardt himself admits, he hasn’t gotten everything on the pandemic right. But far more powerful people have made far bigger mistakes. More power to our best hope for saving the Covid hawks from themselves.

The White House’s chart shenanigans

You didn’t need to be a chart nerd to notice what was wrong with a graphic posted by the official White House Twitter account yesterday. In a bar chart demonstrating record economic growth in the first year of the Biden presidency, the Y axis was misleadingly elongated with evenly spaced intervals separating 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0. The effect of that rogue 5.5 was to make 2021’s GDP growth seem more impressive. “This is y you proofread,” read a tweet sent out by the White House with a corrected graph. An honest mistake or sneaky chart shenanigans? If it was the latter, then it wasn’t especially subtle. Perhaps the White House deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one.