Two-year anniversary of Putin’s Ukraine invasion

 

Two-year anniversary of Putin’s Ukraine invasion

Saturday is the two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is believed to be Moscow’s most bloody conflict since the Second World War. “Two years later, we see even more vividly what we’ve known since day one: Putin miscalculated badly,” said President Joe Biden in a statement Friday.

 “Ten years ago, Putin occupied Crimea, and created puppet regimes in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” Biden said. “Two years ago, he tried to wipe Ukraine off the map. If Putin does not pay the price for his death and destruction, he will keep going. And the costs to the United States—along with our NATO Allies and partners in Europe and around the world—will rise.”

 "The scale of Putin's blunder is especially stark today,” said Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin in his own statement Friday, “The Kremlin's forces failed to win the Battle of Kyiv, failed to topple Ukraine's democratically elected government, and failed to crush the will of the Ukrainian people,” Austin said.

 But with an ammunition shortage, Ukraine’s outlook for 2024 is especially grim, according to most experts and observers. That outlook isn’t expected to change unless more U.S. military aid is approved by House Republicans, as Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, said Thursday in a call with reporters following his recent trip to the Munich Security Conference last weekend.


“The Biden administration has run the well dry” in terms of helping Ukraine with more weapons, and not doing any more for Kyiv will virtually guarantee Ukraine loses, Murphy said Thursday. And most European officials in Munich knew this quite well, as Andrew DiSiderio of Punchbowl News reported last Friday from Germany.

 “Ukraine needs more supplies from the United States to hold the line against Russia’s relentless attacks, which are enabled by arms and ammunition from Iran and North Korea,” Biden said in his statement. “That’s why the House of Representatives must pass the bipartisan national security supplemental bill, before it’s too late,” he pleaded.

 “History is watching,” the president said. “Now is the time to prove that the United States stands up for freedom and bows down to no one,” he added.

 SecDef Austin: “Today's grim milestone should spur us all to decide what kind of future we want for our children and grandchildren: an open, secure, and prosperous world of rules and rights, or the violent and lawless world of aggression and chaos that Putin seeks. We support Ukraine's fight for freedom, both because it is the right thing to do and because doing so is central to America's continued security,” he said.