Biden Says He Didn’t Underestimate Putin Before Ukraine Invasion

In a speech from the White House, he said that “no one expected” that the first sanctions imposed on financial institutions and Putin’s inner circle could “prevent something from happening.”

New economic sanctions against Russia were announced this Thursday by the president of the United States, Joe Biden, after that country’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a speech from the White House, the president said the West will sanction four more Russian banks and that export restrictions will cut off “more than half of Russia’s technology imports.” “This will impose a high cost on the Russian economy, both immediately and in the long term,” he said.

These measures, along with others announced this week, will make Russian President Vladimir Putin “a pariah on the international scene,” Biden said, warning that any country “that accepts open aggression” by Russia against Ukraine “will be stained ” for associating with it.

‘No one expected sanctions to prevent something from happening. It’s going to take time. And we have to show determination in the face of what is coming,” Biden said.

He also said that Putin wants to “restore the Soviet Union” but insisted he would not send US troops to Ukraine and had no plans to talk to the Russian president on the phone.

“He wants, in fact, to restore the former Soviet Union. That’s what it’s about. And that ambition is completely contrary to where the world is today,” he said.

Hours before the US president’s speech, Russian forces seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after fierce fighting on the first day of the Russian offensive. “After a fierce battle we lost control of the Chernobyl site,” said Mijailo Podoliak, chief adviser in President Volodomir Zelensky’s office, after the government reported fighting near the nuclear waste dump of the stricken plant in 1986. .

Biden addressed the nation after attending a closed-door virtual meeting of the G7. The group, made up of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, said in a statement that Russia had unleashed “a serious threat to the rules-based international order.” Biden anticipated on Twitter that the G7 will impose “devastating sanctions packages and other economic measures to hold Russia accountable. We support the brave people of Ukraine.”

The seven industrial powers also said they were “prepared to act” to minimize the consequences on world energy markets of Moscow’s attack on Ukraine and reiterated sanctions on a major oil pipeline in Russia, an energy-rich country.

In London, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain had frozen assets of banking groups and arms manufacturers, sanctioned five more oligarchs and closed its airspace to Russian airline Aeroflot.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said Western sanctions “will isolate the Russian economy from industrial progress, target and freeze assets and financial holdings, and drastically limit access to European and US markets.”

The first round of Western sanctions became known on Tuesday, after Putin announced the dispatch of troops as “peacekeepers” to two small areas already controlled by Moscow-backed separatists.

The US government has joined European allies in imposing sanctions on two Russian banks, Moscow’s sovereign debt and several oligarchs, among other measures.

And on Wednesday, when Russian troops were clearly poised to attack, Biden announced that he would impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which links Germany and Russia. Germany had announced that it would block the opening of the gas pipeline, which is still not working.