Biden’s speech will follow his surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, when he walked the streets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, signaling a U.S. commitment to backing Ukraine’s effort to repel Russian troops.
In Warsaw, he will also meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and leaders of the Bucharest Nine, a group of mostly former Eastern bloc nations once under Soviet influence formed after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and who are increasingly wary of their larger neighbor’s expansionist aspirations.
Building and then bolstering the global coalition allied with Ukraine has been a top White House foreign policy goal for the past year. Stiff Ukrainian military resistance and a river of Western money and munitions have forced Moscow to scale back its plans.
Biden is traveling to a continent that has a strengthened and expanding NATO, and European leaders publicly declared that they are willing to assist Ukraine in its ongoing fight.
But the strength of that coalition — and whether it can deliver a victory for Ukraine and a rebuke of Russia and other authoritarian nations — remain open questions a year into the war. In past weeks, the White House has told Kyiv that it could soon see limits in support from the United States and other countries.
All the U.S. aid packages to Ukraine so far were delivered under a Democratic-controlled Congress. The GOP retook the U.S. House in November, and a vocal minority of right-wing Republicans has vowed to scale back support. Opinion polls show that U.S. citizens have grown weary of the aid effort, mirroring complaints across the globe about billions going to Ukraine instead of other priorities.
Several other heads of state — including Duda, French President Emmanuel Macron, German President Olaf Scholz and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have visited Ukraine.
Zelensky’s visit to Washington in December was a closely held secret, even kept from some of the people charged with transporting him.
During the trip, Zelensky’s first out of his country since the invasion, he held a face-to-face meeting with Biden and addressed a joint session of Congress, telling legislators that the two countries were united by a commitment to democracy, independence and freedom.
“Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided, the destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy,” Zelensky told lawmakers. “Russia has attacked not just us, not just our land, not just our cities — it went on a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values.”
Two months later, speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, Zelensky asked world leaders to back up their commitment to those freedoms, saying they needed to “speed up” their support for Kyiv.
“We need to hurry up. We need speed — speed of our agreements, speed of our delivery … speed of decisions to limit Russian potential. There is no alternative to speed because it is the speed that the life depends on,” Zelensky said via video link.
White House officials have told The Washington Post that they are also recommending Ukraine intensify its push in the coming weeks because of future uncertainties, both in the United States and abroad. A senior administration official said the Biden administration intends to request as much funding as it believes Ukraine needs, but there are no guarantees Congress will approve those requests.
The war in recent months has become a slow grind in eastern Ukraine, with neither side gaining the upper hand. Biden officials say the critical juncture may come in the spring, when Russia is expected to launch an offensive and Ukraine mounts a counteroffensive to reclaim lost territory.
Several administration officials were at the Munich Security Conference in recent days — a yearly confab of political, defense and intelligence officials — to encourage continued support for Ukraine.
Vice President Harris, speaking to the conference a day after Zelensky, told leaders that the world has a humanitarian and strategic interest in continued support of the besieged nation.
Harris also declared that the United States believes strongly that Russia has committed crimes against humanity — a legal designation identifying atrocities directed by high-level officials — and needs to be held to account for ghastly actions following the invasion of Ukraine.
“In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt: These are crimes against humanity,” she said.
Harris spoke of Russian attacks against civilians, including the sexual assault of a 4-year-old, the deadly bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital, and forcibly relocating and “reeducating” 6,000 Ukrainian children.
Blinken’s time at the conference was similarly focused on Ukraine.
In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” with Margaret Brennan, Blinken said the United States was concerned that China was considering providing “lethal support” to Russia in its battle against Ukraine, including weapons and ammunition. He said he warned China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, of “serious consequences” if China provides material support to Russia or helps the country evade sanctions imposed by the international community.
Beijing has not provided direct military support to Russia, but U.S. officials have accused Chinese state companies of providing unspecified assistance to Russia in recent weeks.
Biden is expected to touch on most, if not all, of those themes in his speech. Poland’s prime minister told “Face the Nation” that he and Biden will discuss whether the United States would increase its troop presence in Poland to present a stronger stance against Russia on the NATO alliance’s eastern flank. The United States has about 10,000 personnel on rotation in Poland as part of the NATO alliance.
The president’s last trip to Poland in March 2022 was full of symbolism and strong statements — both visually and verbally. He met with Ukrainian refugees and later said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the test of all time.”
But his otherwise bold speech ended in controversy with an off-the-cuff remark, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
Source link