“You can sit somewhere in an office in Washington and have a cup of tea for 10 minutes, and for 10 minutes here they can do 10 airstrikes and kill dozens of people,” Vsevolod Kozhemyako told The Washington Post.

Kozhemyako’s the founder of Khartia — “charter” — a Ukrainian brigade that began in 2022 as a light infantry battalion funded entirely by Kozhemyako, a billionaire. In hryvnia terms, anyway.

His point — and the Post‘s point in the linked article — was that the two-week delay between Ukraine’s request for permission to use US weapons for cross-border strikes against Russian positions and Joe Biden’s green light was indirectly responsible for Ukrainian casualties. And for a helluva lot of suffering besides.

Biden’s decision to change the rules of engagement comes as Russia acquisitively eyes Kharkiv, which the Kremlin subjected this year to a brutal aerial barrage. One line of thinking said the Russians were content to make Ukraine’s second-largest city unlivable by targeting critical infrastructure. But according to the Post, Lloyd Austin warned in April that Vladimir Putin might ultimately try to capture and hold the city.

Concerns mounted over the ensuing weeks, and on May 13, during a 90-minute teleconference, Kyiv “made a pressing case” to Jake Sullivan, Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Charles Q. Brown Jr. that Ukraine should “be able to use US weapons to fire back over the border into Russia to prevent their city from being overrun,” the Post wrote, documenting the series of events which led Biden to reconsider a ban on, for example, HIMARS strikes against Russian positions across the border.

Although The White House was keen to present the new policy as a meaningful development (if not necessarily a game-changer), skepticism abounds. Biden still won’t allow Ukraine to use longer-range weapons to hit targets deep inside Russia, a capability many observers suggest is necessary for Kyiv to have any hope of retaking the initiative.

And then there’s the problem of inadequate air defenses, a chronic point of contention between the West and Volodymyr Zelensky, who made it clear in a recent interview with The New York Times what he’d like to see in terms of a commitment to keeping Ukraine’s skies free of Russian missiles and Iranian drones. “Shoot down what’s in the sky over Ukraine,” he said. “This is what we saw in Israel. What’s the problem? Why can’t we shoot them down? Is it defense? Yes. Is it an attack on Russia? No. Are you shooting down Russian planes and killing Russian pilots? No. So what’s the issue with involving NATO countries in the war?”

Good questions, all. A NATO commitment to defending Ukraine’s skies in the same way the US and Britain shielded Israel from an Iranian volley would irritate the Kremlin, but it’d also put Putin in a tough spot: As Zelensky noted, the US wouldn’t be killing Russian pilots. Nor shooting down Russian planes. Putin would have to decide whether the act of instituting a de facto Iron Dome over Ukraine constitutes an attack on Russia (i.e., an act of war) and if so, what to do about it. It’s not clear (at all) that he’d do anything beyond what he’s already doing.

Over the weekend, Russia fired dozens of missiles into Ukraine in an apparent bid to further cripple the country’s power grid. DTEK, a large Ukrainian power provider, described “another extremely difficult night for the Ukrainian energy industry.” Some of the 53 Russian missiles launched in the attack were bound for Lviv. Poland scrambled fighter jets.

A day after Ukrainian officials begged Sullivan and Austin to allow strikes on Russian positions over the border, Antony Blinken played “Rockin’ in the Free World” on an electric guitar in a Kyiv bar. As the Post dryly noted, a Ukrainian reconnaissance battalion was “hunkered down” in the border town of Vovchansk “just hoping to survive” during Blinken’s karaoke routine. The battalion commander described an “insane” 40 glide bomb strikes in less than 24 hours. Rockin’ indeed.

On Sunday, Zelensky met Austin on the sidelines of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. “We are very grateful to President Biden and his administration for their continued assistance in the fight for our freedom and independence,” Zelensky remarked.

Later, he addressed the conference. “In the 1990s, Ukraine suffered one of the greatest deceptions in modern history when the security assurances from nuclear powers did not translate into real security,” Zelensky said. “Ukraine handed over its last nuclear warheads to Russia, in line with a multilateral international agreement, and it is Russia who has tried to erase Ukraine from the political map of the world.”

Also on Sunday, the Times published a heavily-sourced investigation documenting the “permanent transfer” to Russia of nearly four-dozen Ukrainian children taken from a foster home on April 25, 2022. Their plight speaks to a broader relocation and assimilation campaign instituted in the aftermath of the invasion.

As a Harvard historian who specializes in Ukraine put it, in remarks to the Times, Putin “believe[s] deep down that the children are Russian. You speed up their Russian-ness by kidnapping them.”