U.S. President Joe Biden used a speech in the Polish capital on February 21 to reiterate “unwavering” support for neighboring Ukraine in its war with Russia and NATO resolve, hours after President Vladimir Putin sought to justify Russia’s unprovoked invasion and announced he’d suspended Moscow’s last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the United States.
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“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden told a crowd at Warsaw’s Royal Castle one day after a surprise visit to the Ukrainian capital as a display of solidarity in a country at war with no U.S. troops on the ground. “I can report: Kyiv stands strong, Kyiv stands proud, it stands tall and, most important, it stands free.”
Biden added that “A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty, brutality will never grind down the will of the free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never.”
Earlier, Biden met with Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has been among the most outspoken supporters of sending weapons and other aid to help Ukraine beat back the Russian forces.
“I call on all European states, NATO states, to show solidarity with Ukraine, to provide military support to Ukraine, so that they have something to fight with,” Duda said. “Do not be afraid to provide this support.”
Hours earlier, Putin used a major address to claim that Russia’s existence was being threatened by the West, which has rallied around Kyiv after the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion almost one year ago.
Speaking in a nationally televised address to Russia’s Federal Assembly just days ahead of the February 24 anniversary of the invasion — an incursion that Putin’s camp expected to last weeks at most but which shows no signs of concluding 12 months later — Putin repeated familiar and often false narratives about Ukraine and other issues, and lashed out at Washington and the West, saying he had tried to avoid war “but behind our backs a very different scenario was being prepared.”
“The West is not plotting to attack Russia as Putin said today,” Biden said in Warsaw. “Millions of Russian citizens who only want to live in peace with their neighbors are not the enemy.”
Putin’s February 21 address, which was canceled in December amid several military setbacks in Ukraine, came one day after U.S. President Joe Biden’s historic visit to Kyiv, which served to undercut the Russian leader’s recent statements that the West is losing interest in backing Ukraine.
Many experts said Putin was hoping for a major battlefield success prior to the talk to provide him with a victory to hail in the speech. However, a Russian offensive appears to have stalled in eastern Ukraine near the city of Bakhmut with severe losses by his forces in what the embattled 70-year-old Russian leader now portrays as a proxy war against the West.
“It’s they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it,” Putin said as he looked out over an audience of lawmakers, state officials, and soldiers who have fought in Ukraine.
Putin’s speech comes hours before Biden, who arrived in Poland from Kyiv late on February 20, is scheduled to give a major policy address in Warsaw, while also meeting with Polish leaders and other allies to discuss the Ukraine conflict, Europe’s biggest land war since World War II.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters ahead of Biden’s speech that the U.S. president would focus on the broader lesson of Ukraine in what he sees as an “inflection point” in a global struggle between democracies and autocratic regimes.
Biden spent more than five hours in Kyiv on February 20 in a surprise visit — an unprecedented journey by a U.S. president into an active war zone where Washington did not have a large military presence — to underscore Washington’s support for Ukraine, a move that appeared to raise spirits among the Ukrainian population.
He pledged $500 million in new arms deliveries at a time when Western allies are looking to project a united front against Russia, which is expected to launch a new offensive in the war in the coming weeks.
In Photos: Biden Visits Ukraine Days Ahead Of Invasion Anniversary
U.S. President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv on February 20, just days ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the country.
Later this week, Biden said Washington would announce additional sanctions against elites and companies “that are trying to evade or backfill Russia’s war machine.”
Russian forces continue to pound military positions and civilian settlements in eastern and southern Ukraine, despite what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called “extraordinarily significant” Russian losses in key disputed areas of the Donetsk region.
In his speech, from which international and independent media were barred from attending, Putin avoided talking about the massive losses global intelligence officials have estimated for Russia in the war, instead once again falsely accusing Ukraine of being run by a “neo-Nazi regime” and vowing that the war will continue until “we solve the tasks ahead of us.”
The accusations prompted Zelenskiy adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak to say “Putin publicly demonstrated his irrelevance and confusion.”
“…He stressed that [Russia] is in ‘taiga deadlock’, has no promising solutions and won’t have any. Because everywhere there are ‘Nazis, Martians and conspiracy theories…’,” Podolyak said on Twitter.
Putin’s address, which lasted just under two hours, was his 18th state-of-the-nation speech to date but came almost two years after his previous speech. Despite being constitutionally mandated to address lawmakers once a year, he did not give an address last year, saying he was forgoing it due to the “dynamics of events.”
In his speech on February 21, he said Russia was suspending its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear arms accord with the United States, further raising concerns over global security during Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
