evidence: From the start of this war (at least from when the U.S. started to send Ukraine billions of dollars’ worth of weapons in response to Putin’s invasion in February 2024), Biden has drawn a very solid red line against sending American or NATO armed forces to fight the war directly. Doing so, he said several times, would mean the start of World War III—and, vital as it was to help Ukraine stave off Russian aggression, it wasn’t vital enough to risk a global conflict quite that cataclysmic. [...] In any case, the strategic situation has now changed. When Biden and other leaders first put limits on what kinds of weapons to send Ukraine, or on how Ukraine should use them, the concern was that Putin might widen or escalate the war if it seemed that Ukraine was about to win. (There were times in the war’s first year, after Ukraine repelled the Russian invaders and pushed them back, when people thought this might be possible.)