How Moscow’s Man in Vienna Fooled Team Biden on Ukraine

A s Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into eastern Ukraine, the Biden administration was once again caught flat-footed. Its first year in office has been filled with unpleasant surprises, from the collapse of the government of Afghanistan to skyrocketing inflation to the stubborn refusal of Yemen’s Houthis to stop behaving like terrorists — even though they were removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). But Putin’s plans for Ukraine were hardly a secret — the Russian strongman has given speeches about his view that Ukraine is part of Russia, written papers on the topic, and has been systematically assembling men and materiel on Ukraine’s borders for months. So how could the administration be so surprised when the invasion actually happened that they spent the first 24 hours debating the technical meaning of the word “invasion”?

The answer to this question may be found some 800 miles west of Ukraine, in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where the negotiations for a new nuclear deal with Iran are taking place. Reviving the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) abandoned by President Trump in 2018 has been a top priority for the Biden administration, which hastened back to the negotiating table in March of their first year in office.

Despite the serial humiliations doled out by the regime in Tehran, including escalating terrorist attacks on America’s allies in the Middle East and a refusal to meet directly with U.S. counterparts, the Biden team (led by Special Envoy for Iran Rob O’Malley) has persisted through third-party intermediaries, including the Russians. In fact, the relationship between the U.S. and Russian delegations has been described as “cordial” and the Russian lead, Mikhail Ulyanov, while hardly a household name, has become something of a celebrity owing to his colorful English-language Twitter feed. When the negotiations foundered in late December of last year, Ulyanov was credited with bringing them back on track and setting the conditions to reach a new deal in 2022.

Reports from Vienna of Russian-facilitated progress with the negotiations in recent weeks must have come as welcome news in Washington, given the Biden administration’s prioritization of getting back into the JCPOA and the need to manufacture a diplomatic win for a struggling presidency. In fact, they may well have effectively acted as a blind to Moscow’s real intentions toward Ukraine if the U.S. team in Vienna has been praising their Russian counterparts as constructive partners in reaching a new deal.

Ulyanov’s popular Twitter feed has, however, in recent days clearly demonstrated the connection between the JCPOA talks and Ukraine from the Russian perspective, as he has begun to intersperse his tweets about the negotiations with messages praising Putin’s action against Ukraine and mocking the U.S. and our European allies. For example:

Berlin decided to suspend certification of #NordStream2.Some analysts say that #Germany has shot itself in the leg. In Russian language we have another “juicy”saying: Just to spite Grandma I will freeze my ears off. It seems to be applicable. [sic]

It may seem curious to have the lead Russian nuclear negotiator joshing publicly about Putin’s weaponization of energy against Western Europe, unless of course the point all along was to exploit the American eagerness to get to a new Iran deal at the expense of every other consideration to Moscow’s advantage as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine.

All eyes are turned toward Kyiv as the Russian forces advance, but Ulyanov’s bait and switch in Vienna may be only the tip of the iceberg of the myriad problems the Biden administration has been willing to overlook in the interests of getting to some — any — nuclear deal. This interest will only intensify if it appears to be caught flat-footed and weak on Ukraine, and it may lead to more dangerous concessions to the Iranians that the Russians will be only too happy to facilitate. The negotiations, which are reportedly entering their end phase, demand our attention.

As we approach the midterm elections in November, for example, President Biden’s eagerness to reduce U.S. domestic gas prices by releasing Iranian oil onto the global market may well blind him to the dangers of taking the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps off the FTO list, which would almost certainly prove in short order as embarrassing as the decision to take the IRGC’s Yemeni proxies the Houthis off that list a year ago.

Ominously, the Biden administration’s actions are also being closely watched by President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, who also has a negotiating team in Vienna and is even more eager to take advantage of perceived American myopia and fecklessness.