Joe Biden has no easy answers for a world stunned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

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This article was published 23/02/2022 (939 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON — “It’s going to be a cold day for Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday afternoon at the White House, talking about the expected long-term effects of new sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would be fair to say that it was a bitterly cold day all around. A day when, as Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said, “we woke up to a changed world.” A day in which we witnessed a massive invasion of the kind not seen in the developed world in generations — an unprovoked territorial war of naked aggression launched by Russia, the largest country in Europe, against Ukraine, the second largest, in explosive waves of destruction from the east and the north and the south, by land and by sea and by air.

“We haven’t seen a conventional move like this, nation-state to nation-state, since World War II,” a U.S. Defense Department official told reporters, predicting that the aim of Russia’s invasion appeared to be taking over Ukraine, “decapitating the government” and installing its own regime.

It also raised the threat of nuclear war, a nightmare that haunted the childhoods of generations in the 20th century before fading into memory over the past three decades. Putin warned Biden and other Western leaders on Wednesday night that he still had a nuclear arsenal, and that in the event of any attempt by the West to intervene in Ukraine, “Russia’s response will be immediate and will bring about such consequences that you have never experienced before.” He added, “I hope I have been heard.”

A lot of assumptions about how great power diplomacy and national aggression are now supposed to work have been upended in the past few days. Experts who claimed that the likelihood of an old-fashioned, take-over-the-country assault on Ukraine by Russia was remote have been left stunned. As Defence Minister Anita Anand said Thursday, many of us in Canada and the United States have come to take security and peace for granted, and believed the kind of thing we are seeing now couldn’t happen. But it is happening.

And it is happening to the people of Ukraine, many of whom huddled in subway stations with their children as their cities were bombed and airports taken over. Many lined up at bank machines in a panic. Many fled in lines of traffic out of the cities, or across borders into Poland, Hungary and Moldova. The United Nations estimates 100,000 people have already been displaced by the fighting. The U.S. government earlier estimated a war of this kind could produce millions of refugees.

The outgunned Ukrainian military was fighting back, by many reports valiantly. One Ukrainian armed forces social media post shared by the Star’s Allan Woods claimed a victory in battle and encouraged citizens to launch insurgent attacks against their invaders.

But the depiction painted in Washington of Ukraine’s prospects was grim. “History has shown time and again how swift gains of territory eventually give way to grinding occupations, acts of massive mass civil disobedience and strategic dead ends,” Biden said at the White House, apparently conceding that the prospect of Russia pulling back now, or failing to gain ground quickly, had vanished. “The next few weeks and months,” he said, “will be hard on the people of Ukraine.”

Biden expressed solidarity with and support for Ukrainians — “America stands up to bullies, we stand up for freedom. This is who we are” — but he didn’t offer any assurance the cavalry was coming to save them. Quite the opposite, in fact: Biden again vowed U.S. troops would not fight in Ukraine. Nor did he offer much hope that this just-begun nightmare would end soon.

He was peppered with questions about whether the invasion was evidence that sanctions had failed, and whether there was any prospect that harsher sanctions would bring about peace. “No one expected sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden replied, adding that their punishing effects won’t be a quick fix for what Putin has done. “This is going to take time,” he said. “He’s not going to say, ‘Oh, my God, these sanctions are coming. I’m going to stand down.’ He’s going to test the resolve of the West to see if we stay together. And we will. We will, and it will impose significant costs on him.”

So far, the major democracies of the world have shown a remarkable level of co-ordination in their response. That united front, Biden indicated, may be a major reason banning Russia from participation in the SWIFT international banking system wasn’t yet part of the package, as Ukrainian officials have pleaded it should be. Some European leaders, he suggested, weren’t ready to pursue that option yet (although he also insisted the banking sanctions he’d just announced would bite harder than that option, anyway). These decisions are being made together by a coalition of nations.

“The good news is, NATO is more united and more determined than ever,” Biden said. Given that is the opposite of what Putin has wanted, it is a glimmer of silver in the lining of a very dark cloud.

But on a day like this, it was hard to be warmed by such signals of longer-term resilience. It seemed likely that Kyiv might fall to the Russian invaders in days, or even hours. From there, we’re in territory that we’ve lost the charts to navigate confidently.

As Freeland said, it is a changed world. A cold one. And the chill is going to be felt for a long time.

Edward Keenan is the Star’s Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca