Between two personality types — absent-minded professor and off-kilter chief executive — the American president is plainly veering into the latter category as one international debacle after another piles up. The latest is the fall of Bakhmut: Kyiv insists that Russia, having laid waste to the strategically situated town in eastern Ukraine, has “not occupied” it. 

With the Washington Post reporting that Ukrainian forces “have been reduced to small footholds,” the human toll of a months-long battle of attrition is coming into view, with both Russians and Ukrainians counting hundreds of casualties. It’s something to which President Trump alluded in a recent CNN “town hall,” and for which he was unfairly excoriated. 

Was any of this avoidable? Last year this newspaper chronicled Russia’s ruthless bombardment of Mariupol, turning a thriving Black Sea port city of nearly half a million people into a wretched tangle of destruction with some three-quarters of its population having been evacuated. Russia moved in, and with the exception of the valiant last stand of the defenders of the Azovstal iron and steel works, the city’s tragic fate receded from the front pages — and possibly also from the president’s daily security briefing. 

If so, that would have been an egregious oversight, not that our top diplomat, Secretary Blinken, doesn’t love a good omission. That is because there were doubtless  lessons to be drawn from the devastation of Mariupol that could have helped avert the chaos at Bakhmut, or at least minimized it. 

Remember those leaked Pentagon documents from last month? It is not even clear if President Biden saw them before they were leaked. Or after. For if he had bothered to jump in at any point, he would have read in plain English that our own intelligence officials had for months prior to April been advising Ukraine to withdraw from Bakhmut, the better to preserve forces for a more significant and presumably more coherent counteroffensive. 

Doing so would not have been a capitulation by any means, but judging by the present circumstances and newfound Russian braggadocio — look for more of that to come in the short term — simply part of a more prudent strategy. It’s one that might have tamped down immediate expectations and alleviated strain on what will ultimately be Ukraine’s most important and irreplaceable weapon: its young soldiers.

President Zelensky visited the front line near Bakhmut in March to rally the troops, a welcome move, but he did not stay long. At about the same time a Polish military analyst, Konrad Muzyka, visited the Bakhmut area with his colleagues and said then that, as Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported, “it no longer made sense to maintain control of the city from a military point of view, given the scale of casualties and the cost to Ukraine.”

That was nearly two months ago, in March. What was the president doing in the weeks after the flurry of dark prognostications about beleaguered Bakhmut? Where was he? Well, for a chunk of April he was getting in touch with his roots in Ireland, and jet lag at his age comes with both physical and mental costs. Whatever: Sleepy Joe took his eye off the ball. 

Sure, Secretary Austin and the NATO chief have cast the fall of Bakhmut as mostly symbolic, and maybe it is, but it is part of their job to put a good spin on what is unequivocally a bad bit of news. 

When Russia starts turning its guns on Chasiv Yar, the next town over to the west, how symbolic will that be? President Putin will not stop there. Also, did Mr. Biden forget that a much bigger city to the south of Bakhmut, Donetsk, is already controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces? Or that this theater of the Russo-Ukrainian war has been going on since 2014?

“Tactical encirclement” is the new phrase to describe Ukraine’s next moves to extend the fight around Bakhmut. Yet it will take more than buzzwords and pledges of more assistance, as essential as those are for this ongoing fight, to really turn the page. But absence of strategy — that Biden special — means one blank page after another, and lets the Kremlin write more of this godforsaken novel than it should ever have been allowed.

Russia acts, America reacts: This is not a strategy that worked under President Obama, and under Mr. Biden it is now failing all of us, Ukraine included.