According to a dozen interviews with White House officials, members of Congress and others involved in the effort, Biden has deliberately worked with allies abroad to deny the Russian leader the one-on-one, Washington vs. Moscow dynamic that the President and his aides think Putin wants. Publicly and privately talking about the war as a fight for freedom and democracy, Biden has left other leaders to speak with Putin.
“What Putin is trying to do is surround and encircle Kyiv,” said Rep. Greg Meeks, a Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “What Biden is trying to do is have the whole world surround Putin.”
Part of the lesson Biden took from being involved as vice president during Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was that NATO nations would need a much faster, more humiliating and more cohesive response than the months of infighting that produced sanctions so weak that Putin rode them out. Yet administration officials admit privately that if Putin had invaded Ukraine a year ago, events might have unfolded much differently coming right off four years of former President Donald Trump’s damaging relationships and calling NATO obsolete.
Campaigning in 2020, Biden spoke about the confrontation he saw coming.
“Putin has one overriding objective: To break NATO, to weaken the Western alliance and to further diminish our ability to compete in the Pacific by working out something with China,” Biden told CNN’s Gloria Borger at the time. “And it’s not going to happen on my watch.”
Biden’s own last conversation with Putin was on February 12, more than a week before the invasion started. And for a President and aides who on almost everything else complain that they don’t get the credit they deserve, on Ukraine he and administration officials have ducked talk about him being leader of the free world, despite how much of the sanctions and international response are a result of Washington’s guidance and pressure.
The result is Putin’s being boxed in more than even Biden had expected, along with a sustained level of attention to the war abroad and in America that has surprised White House aides — without rebooting a 1980s-style Cold War.
“Joe Biden,” a senior administration official said, “has known Vladimir Putin for decades and knows exactly who he’s dealing with.”
Cutting Putin off — literally and figuratively
Cutting off Putin began, as Biden might say, literally.
Whenever they’d speak, Biden would interrupt Putin as the Russian President launched into complaints that American officials see as a whataboutism tactic designed to distract and undermine.
No, Biden would say, that’s not what we’re talking about, according to one senior administration official who has witnessed those conversations. Or, no, that’s not how things happened 20 or 25 years ago, in whichever past grievance Putin was bringing up to justify his behavior.
“President Putin can’t use a lot of his common tricks with President Biden, like trying to confuse people by going down long historical tangents or meandering into the minutiae of policies because President Biden sees those tactics coming a mile away and doesn’t take the bait. He’ll try to get President Biden off topic by citing an obscure section of the Minsk agreements or a speech someone gave in the late 1990s,” a senior administration official said, adding that Biden “is going to always steer the conversation directly back to what he’s come to talk about.”
Biden has often told a story of a meeting with Putin at the Kremlin in 2011, when he was vice president, and telling the Russian leader, “I’m looking in your eyes and don’t think you have a soul” — a cutting response to President George W. Bush’s infamous 2001 comments getting a sense of Putin’s soul from looking him in the eye and finding him to be “very straightforward and trustworthy.” A Biden administration official, by contrast, sent CNN highlights of Biden’s history on the topic over the years, from calling Putin a “bully”…
Read More: Biden’s strategy with Putin is decades in the making