evidence: Instead, Ukraine defied expectations and held off Russia’s assault on Kyiv. The White House was suddenly improvising a strategy for a long war. But Putin’s increasingly explicit nuclear sabre-rattling meant that the early months of the conflict were spent in arguments over what might or might not cross Russia’s red line. In the spring of 2022, a debate raged in Washington over whether to give Ukraine the precision medium-range missile system known as HIMARS. When Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, led a congressional delegation to Kyiv to meet with Zelensky, the Ukrainian President’s "main ask" was for the HIMARS, according to Jason Crow, a House Democrat and a military veteran. Eventually, Biden approved the delivery, with the proviso that the HIMARS not be used to hit targets inside Russia. "I felt like we dragged our feet," a Democratic senator told me. Ukraine, meanwhile, moved on to the next items on its list. Arguments ensued over tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and longer-range missiles known as ATACMS. [...] In September, shortly before Zelensky made his second visit to Washington since the invasion, Biden approved sending ATACMS to Ukraine, after nearly a year of resisting the idea. American officials, meanwhile, have held two rounds of formal negotiations with Ukraine over the terms of a memorandum of understanding—Sullivan’s "Israel model." With Trump barrelling toward the Republican nomination, however, the political support that had once seemed so strong and bipartisan for Ukraine in Washington has been quickly eroding.