President Vladimir Putin has used a major address to try and justify Moscow’s war against Ukraine, claiming Russia’s existence is being threatened by the West, which has rallied around Kyiv after the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion almost one year ago.
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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.”
Washington immediately slammed the “absurdity” of Putin’s words, saying “nobody is attacking Russia,” while Kyiv dismissed Putin as “irrelevant and confused.”
Putin’s February 21 address, which was canceled in December amid several military setbacks in Ukraine, comes a 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 during Putin’s speech that “this was a war of choice” for Russia and that Moscow could end the conflict if it so desired.
“Nobody is attacking Russia. There’s a kind of absurdity in the notion that Russia was under some form of military threat from Ukraine or anyone else,” Sullivan said in Warsaw.
“Russia stops fighting the war in Ukraine and goes home, the war ends,” he said. “Ukraine stops fighting and the United States and the coalition stops helping them fight, then Ukraine disappears from the map.”
Sullivan said that, in his speech, Biden 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.
He also took direct aim at Putin and his justifications for launching the offensive in Ukraine, saying the Russian leader “thought he could outlast us.”
“But he was dead wrong,” Biden said. “One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”
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.”
The visit came as 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 a very high “dynamics of events.”
