KYIV, Ukraine — In December 2015, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice president, appeared before Ukraine’s Parliament with a two-pronged message. The United States would defend the country from Russia, Mr. Biden said, but lawmakers in Kyiv also needed to fortify their own democracy with real progress on anticorruption reforms.
“This is your moment. This is your responsibility,” Mr. Biden told the lawmakers. “And while Russian aggression persists,” he added, “the cost imposed on Moscow will continue to rise.”
More than six years later, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Kyiv this week — the first such trip by a senior Biden administration official — with virtually the same message.
“Ukraine faces twin challenges: aggression from outside coming from Russia, and, in effect, aggression from within coming from corruption, oligarchs and others who are putting their interests ahead of those of the Ukrainian people,” he said.
While Mr. Blinken’s trip was a demonstration of renewed American commitment to an independent, democratic and Western-leaning Ukraine, for many longtime watchers of U.S.-Ukraine policy, it was a depressing reminder of how little has changed in a country that has become ground zero for a renewed power struggle between Washington and Moscow.
“It is very much déjà vu,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a Russia expert with the Center for a New American Security who advised the Biden transition team. “It all feels eerily similar to where we’ve already been.”
That matters to the Biden administration not just because many of its top officials are personally invested in Ukraine’s fate: Mr. Biden traveled there six times as vice president, and Mr. Blinken’s grandfather was born there. Experts agree that Mr. Biden’s goal of a stable relationship with Russia, allowing for cooperation on shared concerns including Iran and climate, requires cooling tensions over Ukraine.
“Unless you get Russian movement on Ukraine and dealing with European stability you don’t get a larger breakthrough on U.S.-Russia relations,” said John F. Tefft, who served as the American ambassador to Moscow from 2009 to 2013.
Recent history does not suggest optimism.
For years, U.S. officials have implored Ukraine’s leaders to deliver on promises to drive out political corruption, a main cause of the 2014 popular revolution that pushed out the country’s Russian-backed president — and a source of continued Russian influence.
“It is no exaggeration to say that the hopes of freedom-loving people the world over are with you because so much rides on your fragile experiment with democracy succeeding,” Mr. Biden said in 2015, urging Ukraine’s Parliament to press ahead with change. “It may be your last moment.”
While Ukraine has made some clear progress since Mr. Biden’s visit, U.S. officials worry about backsliding. Last week, the State Department publicly rebuked Ukraine’s government for removing the chief of the country’s oil and gas company — “just the latest example of ignoring best practices and putting Ukraine’s hard-fought economic progress at risk,” a spokesman for the State Department, Ned Price, told reporters.
During his visit on Thursday, Mr. Blinken pressed the message, stressing to the Ukrainian television network ICTV “the imperative that Kyiv move forward with its domestic reform agenda.”
Close observers of the country are skeptical. “The fact that most of the economy is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals is pretty hard to undo,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
It is all the more difficult to carry out hard overhauls, Mr. Charap added, when Ukraine’s politicians “recognize that they’re too big to fail,” meaning that it would be very difficult for Western leaders to withdraw support from their government, handing Mr. Putin a huge victory in the process.
Then there is the Russian military threat. For just as long, U.S. officials have vowed to ensure Ukraine can defend itself against Russia. The United States currently sends Kyiv more than $400 million in annual military assistance. Even during the tenure of President Donald J. Trump — who was accused of leveraging American military aid in a hunt for information to be used against Mr. Biden — other senior officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, repeatedly committed to the country’s defense against Russia.
But Mr. Putin has not backed off, and this spring, he escalated his threat with an immense buildup of as many as 100,000 Russian troops along Ukraine’s eastern border. U.S. officials say that as many as 80,000 of those troops remain, including warships off Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, and that Mr. Putin could still mount an invasion if he chooses.
Recent headlines have focused less on Russia’s undeclared shadow military campaign in eastern Ukraine, where Mr. Putin backs a pro-Russian separatist insurgency that has left some 13,000 people dead. Mr. Putin intervened there shortly after Kyiv’s 2014 revolution threatened to tilt the former Soviet republic into the West’s orbit.
In February 2015, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a cease-fire and peace process for the conflict that several European nations brokered with the support of the United States. But the agreement has since achieved little, and the conflict in the region, known as the Donbas, remains frozen — a status quo that works fine for Moscow, less so for a Ukraine that is now effectively divided.
When Mr. Biden addressed the Parliament later that year, he spoke with a confidence that, when it comes to influencing Mr. Putin’s behavior, has rarely borne out in recent years.
“The United States and Europe will maintain pressure until Moscow fulfills its commitments under the Minsk agreement,” Mr. Biden said.
Far from it, Moscow has essentially abandoned the peace process. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, recently called for a revamped one in which the United States would play a larger role.
Mr. Blinken had little to say about that, in public at least, during his visit. U.S. officials are still devising an approach on the Minsk process and say they first wanted to hear directly from Ukrainian officials on the matter.
In the near term, the Biden administration is considering more military aid for Ukraine, but Mr. Biden is not looking for a sharp escalation.
In a recent essay, Kurt Volker, who served as the Trump administration’s special representative for Ukraine, argued that the Biden administration flinched in response to Mr. Putin’s military buildup, underscoring that “the West may talk a good game, but Ukraine cannot count on Western support.”
Such talk leaves analysts like Mr. Charap fatalistic.
Eventually you’re going to be stuck with this simmering conflict for a long, long time,” he said. “And the next secretary of state visit, in four or eight years, is going to look remarkably similar in its talking points to this one.”
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