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According to a dozen interviews with White House officials, members of Congress and others involved in the effort, Biden has deliberately worked with allies abroad to deny the Russian leader the one-on-one, Washington vs. Moscow dynamic that the President and his aides think Putin wants. Publicly and privately talking about the war as a fight for freedom and democracy, Biden has left other leaders to speak with Putin.
“What Putin is trying to do is surround and encircle Kyiv,” said Rep. Greg Meeks, a Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “What Biden is trying to do is have the whole world surround Putin.”
Part of the lesson Biden took from being involved as vice president during Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was that NATO nations would need a much faster, more humiliating and more cohesive response than the months of infighting that produced sanctions so weak that Putin rode them out. Yet administration officials admit privately that if Putin had invaded Ukraine a year ago, events might have unfolded much differently coming right off four years of former President Donald Trump’s damaging relationships and calling NATO obsolete.
Campaigning in 2020, Biden spoke about the confrontation he saw coming.
“Putin has one overriding objective: To break NATO, to weaken the Western alliance and to further diminish our ability to compete in the Pacific by working out something with China,” Biden told CNN’s Gloria Borger at the time. “And it’s not going to happen on my watch.”
Biden’s own last conversation with Putin was on February 12, more than a week before the invasion started. And for a President and aides who on almost everything else complain that they don’t get the credit they deserve, on Ukraine he and administration officials have ducked talk about him being leader of the free world, despite how much of the sanctions and international response are a result of Washington’s guidance and pressure.
The result is Putin’s being boxed in more…
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Source : cnn
