02-22-2023, 12:12 PM
Biden and Putin’s dueling speeches show why the end of the Ukraine war is a long way off
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After a surprise visit to Kyiv in the midst of the ongoing war, President Joe Biden delivered a rallying speech on US support for Ukraine.
Speaking to a crowd of thousands in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday, Biden framed the war as a battle between democracy and autocracy, as he has consistently done for the past year. He expanded upon the rhetoric of his recent State of the Union address, saying that since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly one year ago, “the whole world faced a test for the ages,” and emphasized the resolve of the US and NATO to continue to bolster Ukraine’s defense.
Hours earlier in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his own address. He justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with some revisionist history, emphasized the massive quantity of weapons the West has provided Ukraine, and announced the withdrawal from an important arms control agreement with the United States. It’s a chilling indication that the stakes of this war are not just Ukraine’s future but the world’s future. The threat of a nuclear conflict always lingers in the background.
“The worst-case scenario is escalation,” Hans Kundnani of the British think tank Chatham House told me. “It seems to me the best-case scenario here is a forever war, unless the Biden administration does push toward negotiations.”
But neither Ukraine nor Russia have expressed any openness to negotiations at this stage.
Tuesday’s split-screen speeches are a reminder that a year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both Biden and Putin are doubling down. “We have every confidence that you’re going to continue to prevail,” Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day earlier in Ukraine. But that confidence in public may be obscuring anxieties that foreign policy leaders are expressing in private as the war continues into its second year, as major democracies like India decline to take a firm side, and as the risks of the war expanding beyond Ukraine’s borders are heightened.
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Speaking to a crowd of thousands in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday, Biden framed the war as a battle between democracy and autocracy, as he has consistently done for the past year. He expanded upon the rhetoric of his recent State of the Union address, saying that since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly one year ago, “the whole world faced a test for the ages,” and emphasized the resolve of the US and NATO to continue to bolster Ukraine’s defense.
Hours earlier in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his own address. He justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with some revisionist history, emphasized the massive quantity of weapons the West has provided Ukraine, and announced the withdrawal from an important arms control agreement with the United States. It’s a chilling indication that the stakes of this war are not just Ukraine’s future but the world’s future. The threat of a nuclear conflict always lingers in the background.
“The worst-case scenario is escalation,” Hans Kundnani of the British think tank Chatham House told me. “It seems to me the best-case scenario here is a forever war, unless the Biden administration does push toward negotiations.”
But neither Ukraine nor Russia have expressed any openness to negotiations at this stage.
Tuesday’s split-screen speeches are a reminder that a year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both Biden and Putin are doubling down. “We have every confidence that you’re going to continue to prevail,” Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day earlier in Ukraine. But that confidence in public may be obscuring anxieties that foreign policy leaders are expressing in private as the war continues into its second year, as major democracies like India decline to take a firm side, and as the risks of the war expanding beyond Ukraine’s borders are heightened.
- More -