U.S. President Joe Biden said Ukraine “stands strong” a year after the Russian invasion and that Moscow would never defeat its neighbor, speaking hours after the Kremlin suspended a landmark nuclear arms control treaty over the West’s support for Kyiv.
Days ahead of the first anniversary of the Feb. 24 invasion, Biden proclaimed “unwavering” support for Kyiv and a commitment to bolstering Nato’s eastern flank facing Russia, while rejecting Moscow’s contention that the West was planning to attack Russia.
“The West was not plotting to attack Russia, as Putin said today … This war was never a necessity. It’s a tragedy. President Putin chose this war,” Biden said. Signed by then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, the treaty caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads the countries can deploy.
Putin said Ukraine had sought to strike a facility deep inside Russia where it keeps nuclear bombers, a reference to the Engels air base. Ukraine has followed a policy of not publicly claiming responsibility for any attacks on Russian soil.Putin, who has over the past year repeatedly hinted that Russia could use a nuclear weapon if threatened, was in effect saying that he could dismantle the architecture of nuclear arms control unless the West backs off in Ukraine.
Kyiv and Western leaders such as Biden reject that narrative as an unfounded pretext for a Russian land grab in a fellow former Soviet republic that Putin calls an artificial state, and say he must be made to lose his gamble on invasion.“He is in a completely different reality, where there is no opportunity to conduct a dialogue about justice and international law,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told Reuters.
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