WaPo (“Biden makes surprise visit to Ukraine ahead of Russian invasion anniversary“):
President Biden made a dramatic, unannounced visit to Kyiv on Monday, in a display of strong American support for Ukraine just four days before the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The secret, high-risk visit to the historic Ukrainian capital — where air raid sirens blared as Biden walked the streets — signals continued commitment from the United States, the largest financial and military backer of Ukraine’s effort to repel Russian invaders from its territory.
Biden was spotted outside St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly before noon local time. His visit capped an hours-long security lockdown as authorities blocked car traffic and even pedestrians from certain streets.
Biden has insisted the United States will continue to back Ukraine for “as long as it takes” despite flagging support among the American public and no near-term prospect of peace talks to end the conflict.
The Biden administration has provided some $30 billion in security aid since President Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, initiating the largest ground war in Europe since World War II — one that has cost his country and Ukraine hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Under Biden’s leadership, the United States and its NATO allies have gradually expanded the array of weaponry they have pledged to include heavy tanks.
While other world leaders have visited Kyiv to meet with Zelensky and tour the war-scarred city over the past year, Biden has stayed away due to security concerns and fears about the possibility of conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers, sending senior aides in his place. First lady Jill Biden made a surprise visit to Western Ukraine on Mother’s Day in May.
In a statement issued by the White House, Biden said his visit was intended to reaffirm American support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, which Russia has violated since 2014, when Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and launched support for a separatist campaign in the eastern Donbas region.
“When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us,” Biden said. “But he was dead wrong.”
WaPo Moscow Bureau Chief Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton offer a view I’ve been arguing for most of the conflict (“Putin, czar with no empire, needs military victory for his own survival“):
President Vladimir Putin likes to portray himself as a new czar like Peter the Great or Ivan III, the 15th-century grand prince known as the “gatherer of the Russian lands.” But Putin’s year-long war in Ukraine has failed so far to secure the lands he aims to seize, and in Russia, there is fear that he is leading his nation into a dark period of strife and stagnation — or worse.
Some in the elite also say the Russian leader now desperately needs a military victory to ensure his own survival. “In Russia, loyalty does not exist,” one Russian billionaire said.
Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began with hubris and a zeal to reshape the world order. But even as he suffered repeated military defeats — diminishing his stature globally and staining him with allegations of atrocities being committed by his troops — Putin has tightened his authoritarian grip at home, using the war to destroy any opposition and to engineer a closed, paranoid society hostile to liberals, hipsters, LGBTQ people, and, especially, Western-style freedom and democracy.
The Russian president’s squadrons of cheerleaders swear he “simply cannot lose” in Ukraine, thanks to Russia’s vast energy wealth, nuclear weapons and sheer number of soldiers it can throw onto the battlefield. These supporters see Putin rising supreme from Ukraine’s ashes to lead a swaggering nation defined by its repudiation of the West — a bigger, more powerful version of Iran.
But business executives and state officials say Putin’s own position at the top could prove precarious as doubts over his tactics grow among the elite. For many of them, Putin’s gambit has unwound 30 years of progress made since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin’s vision of Russia horrifies many oligarchs and state officials, who confide that the war has been a catastrophic error that has failed in every goal. But they remain paralyzed, fearful and publicly silent.
“Among the elite, though they understand it was a mistake, they still fear to do anything themselves,” said the only Russian diplomat to publicly quit office over the war, Boris Bondarev, formerly based at Russia’s U.N. mission in Geneva. “Because they have gotten used to Putin deciding everything.”
Some are sure that Putin can maintain his hold on power without a victory, as long as he keeps the war going and wears down Western resolve and weapons supplies.For anyone in the elite to act, Bondarev said, “there needs to be an understanding that Putin is leading the country to total collapse. While Putin is still bombing and attacking, people think the situation is not so bad. There needs to be a full military loss, and only then will people understand they need to do something.”
What all camps seem to agree on is that Putin shows no willingness to give up. As Russia’s battlefield position deteriorated in recent months, he escalated repeatedly, shuffling his commanders, unleashing brutal airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and threatening to use nuclear weapons.
Now, with his troops reinforced by conscripts and convicts and poised to launch new offensives, the 70-year-old Russian leader needs a win to maintain his own credibility. “Putin needs some success to demonstrate to society that he is still very successful,” a senior Ukrainian security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss politically sensitive issues.
NYT Moscow Bureau Chief Anton Troianovski and Valerie Hopkins offer a somewhat darker take (“One Year Into War, Putin Is Crafting the Russia He Craves“):
The grievances, paranoia and imperialist mind-set that drove President Vladimir V. Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war — a broad, if uneven, societal upheaval that has left the Russian leader more dominant than ever at home.
Schoolchildren collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from “aggressors who seek world domination.”
Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, their antiwar performers and artists expunged. New exhibits put on by the state have titles like “NATOzism” — a play on “Nazism” that seeks to cast the Western military alliance as posing a threat as existential as the Nazis of World War II.
Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that have sprung up in the first 30 years of post-Soviet Russia have met an abrupt end, while nationalist groups once seen as fringe have taken center stage.
As Friday’s first anniversary of the invasion approaches, Russia’s military has suffered setback after setback, falling far short of its goal of taking control of Ukraine. But at home, facing little resistance, Mr. Putin’s year of war has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.
“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultraconservative business tycoon, bragged in a phone interview on Saturday. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society is cleansing itself from liberalism and the Western poison.”
That the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia’s transformation go far deeper, he said, than it would have had Mr. Putin’s hopes for a swift victory been realized.
“If the Blitzkrieg had succeeded, nothing would have changed,” he said.
The Kremlin for years sought to keep Mr. Malofeyev at arm’s length, even as he funded pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to be reformed into an empire of “traditional values,” free of Western influence. But that changed after the invasion, as Mr. Putin turned “traditional values” into a rallying cry — signing a new anti-gay law, for instance — while styling himself as another Peter the Great retaking lost Russian lands.
Most important, Mr. Malofeyev said, Russia’s liberals have either been silenced or have fled the country, while Western companies have left voluntarily.
That change was evident last Wednesday at a gathering off the traffic-jammed Garden Ring road in Moscow, where some of the most prominent rights activists who have remained in Russia came together for the latest of many recent farewells: The Sakharov Center, a human rights archive that was a liberal hub for decades, was opening its last exhibit before being forced to shut under a new law.
The center’s chairman, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, once a Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that “what we just couldn’t have imagined two years ago or even a year ago is happening today.”
“A new system of values has been built,” Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, said afterward. “Brutal and archaic public values.”
A year ago, as Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility; Mr. Putin, after all, had styled himself as a peace-loving president who would never attack another country. So after the invasion started — stunning some of the president’s closest aides — the Kremlin scrambled to adjust its propaganda to justify it.
It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing “Nazis” who took power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message went, and the goal of Mr. Putin’s “special military operation” was to end the war the West had started.
In a series of addresses aimed at shoring up domestic support, Mr. Putin cast the invasion as a near-holy war for Russia’s very identity, declaring that it was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being forced upon it by an aggressive West.
The full power of the state was deployed to spread and enforce that message. National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, dropped entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were directed to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; the police hunted down people for offenses like antiwar Facebook posts, helping to push hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.
“Society in general has gone off the rails,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, said in a phone interview. “They’ve flipped the ideas of good and evil.”
I’m of mixed mind on the Biden visit. The propaganda value is high, in that it shows American support in a way that’s more visible than the aid shipments. At the same time, rising the President’s life for a publicity stunt is unwise, especially when Kamala Harris is the fallback plan.
In terms of the war itself, I remain in the place I’ve been for months: Putin is losing in spectacular fashion but there’s no end in sight. He’s destroying Ukraine and Russia at the same time but there’s no obvious offramp. This is especially true if he’s managed to convince his people that they’re in an existential fight against the West.
