According to a dozen interviews with White House officials, members of Congress and others involved in the effort, Biden deliberately worked with allies abroad to deprive the Russian leader of the one-on-one, Washington-Moscow dynamic that involved the president and his aides. I think Putin wants. Speaking publicly and privately about the war as a fight for freedom and democracy, Biden gave other leaders the opportunity to talk to Putin.
“Putin is trying to surround and surround Kyiv,” said Rep. Greg Meeks, a Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “What Biden is trying to do is get the whole world to surround Putin.”
Part of the lesson Biden learned from serving 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 led to such weak sanctions that Putin lifted them. However, administration officials privately acknowledge that if Putin had invaded Ukraine a year ago, things might have played out very differently, given former President Donald Trump’s four years of tainted relations and calling NATO obsolete.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden spoke of a confrontation he foresaw.
“Putin has one primary goal: to destroy NATO, weaken the Western alliance, and further reduce our ability to compete in the Pacific by working out something with China,” Biden told CNN’s Gloria Borger at the time. “And it won’t happen in my hours.”
Biden himself last spoke to Putin on February 12, more than a week before the invasion began. As for the president and his aides, who in almost every other way complain that they are not getting the recognition they deserve, in regards to Ukraine, he and administration officials shy away from talking about him being the leader of the free world, despite how much sanctions and international backlash are the result of Washington’s leadership and pressure.
As a result, Putin is more cornered than even Biden expected, along with a consistent level of attention to the war abroad and in America that has surprised White House aides—without a 1980s-style Cold War reset.
“Joe Biden,” a senior administration official said, “has known Vladimir Putin for decades and knows exactly who he is dealing with.”
Cut off Putin – literally and figuratively
They began to cut off Putin, as Biden would say, literally.
Whenever they spoke, Biden interrupted Putin when the Russian president made complaints that U.S. officials see as a “what about distraction and undermining” tactic.
No, Biden would say, that’s not what we’re talking about, according to one senior administration official who witnessed the conversations. Or no, that was not the case 20 or 25 years ago, no matter what past grievances Putin cited to justify his behavior.
“President Putin cannot use many of his usual tricks with President Biden, such as trying to confuse people by going down long historical tangents or getting into the minutiae of politics, because President Biden sees these tactics from a mile away and does not heed. He will try to divert President Biden from the topic by referring to a little-known section of the Minsk Agreements or a speech given by someone in the late 1990s,” a senior administration official said, adding that Biden “will always guide the conversation.” straight to what he came to talk about.”
Biden often told the story of meeting Putin in the Kremlin in 2011 when he was vice president and telling the Russian leader, “I look you in the eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.” a scathing response to President George W. Bush’s infamous comments in 2001 to understand Putin’s soul by looking into his eyes and finding him “very straightforward and trustworthy”. By contrast, a Biden administration official sent CNN highlights of Biden’s history on the topic over the years, from calling Putin a “hooligan” in 2006 to calling him a “kleptomaniac” in 2019.
A White House aide who was present in the situation room at an emergency meeting of the National Security Council on Feb. 10 said Biden’s attitude towards Putin was demonstrated throughout the course of the conversation, in which the White House’s assessment of the invasion went from a possibility to almost a certainty.
“At that meeting, it was clear and clear that he believed that Putin would do this,” the aide said. “He spoke with the experience of someone who knows Putin and has dealt with Putin.”
Biden learns from 2014 and the importance of unity
Biden believes that he could not maintain the current level of unity – in the US and around the world – if Putin provoked the same partisan split that he did in 2014, when many senior Republicans spoke with admiration of his strength and leadership in largely because he fought Barack Obama.
Biden did not pursue Trump as some in his party want, did not raise attacks on the 2016 election, or attack Republicans for voting against the former president’s first impeachment when Trump took advantage of the suspension of military assistance to Ukraine in chasing dirt on Biden.
“The crisis in Ukraine makes clear what was at stake then, and there must be accountability for it,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, chairman of the House Democratic campaign team. “I don’t think it makes sense to play politics with war. I think it makes sense to be the moral voice of what’s right and what’s wrong – and I’m proud to be part of the party and we have a president who knows the good guys and the bad guys in Ukraine. And the other side seems to be fighting it.”
This message will not come from the president himself.
“Putin wanted to divide us. We were one. It is important that we send this signal to the world,” the White House aide said.
Most Republicans — with a few notable exceptions, including Trump himself’s apparent struggle to try to erase the memory that his first reaction to the intrusion was to call Putin “smart” and “savvy” — did not attack Biden, despite much controversy both among Republicans and Democrats on the details of the president’s reaction.
However, Republicans were unconvinced of the other part of Biden’s strategy: They called the rise in fuel prices “Putin’s price increase” and “Putin’s gas tax” as an attempt to appease voters.
“These are not Putin’s gas prices. These are President Biden’s gas prices,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said last week.
On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell added: “It is very clear that Vladimir Putin is not the cause of this runaway inflation.”
White House aides are tracking all Republicans in the House and Senate calling for tougher energy sanctions on Russia and preparing to expose them as hypocrites if they complain about higher gas prices on the campaign trail this fall. But at the same time, Biden himself kept in touch with Republican lawmakers.
This included a personal briefing to all four top congressional leaders last month and a surprise phone call from a bipartisan delegation at the Munich Security Conference to thank them for their support. During the call, Vice President Kamala Harris held her cell phone up to a microphone so lawmakers could hear Biden speaking from the Oval Office table.
Putin has spent years tracking what Biden did and said about him. This includes friendly Russian commentators who complained in 2009 that Biden was an “eminence grise” who secretly orchestrated the Obama administration’s crackdown on Putin’s leadership after the then vice president said Russia was lame, or a Kremlin spokesman on Thursday. stating that Biden’s war crime claim was “unacceptable and unforgivable”.
Despite Biden amplifying what he said about Putin, he could only go so far before tripping over the escalation he is so desperate to avoid.
“It hurts him to see the devastation in Ukraine and it would be easy to say, ‘This guy is evil and we’re coming after him and we’re going to catch him,'” Meeks said. “The question is, is it right? Because then you are talking about World War III.”