President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, born in Leningrad, Russia on Oct. 7, 1952, has taken a page out of Hitler’s playbook by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
President Joe Biden responded to Putin’s aggression on Feb. 24 at a news conference at the White House by announcing sanctions against Russia, but he stopped short of declaring sanctions against Putin himself or Russia’s participation in S.W.I.F.T., the international banking system.
Biden responded to a reporter’s question concerning the current relationship that the U.S. now has with Russia after the attack that came without provocation by saying, “There is a complete rupture in the U.S. and Russia relations.”
Biden stated that Putin had attacked America’s ally without provocation after rejecting every ploy offered to him to seek a peaceful solution to the Russian separatists’ conflict with Ukraine’s military in Eastern Ukraine, a conflict that has been ongoing since Putin took over Crimea in 2014 during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Crimea was part of Ukraine, and the sanctions that Obama placed on Russia has not detered Putin from his quest to reconstruct the Soviet Union that Ukraine was part of along with 14 other republics, including Russia.
The sanctions that Biden announced are ones that U.S. allies have agreed to impose, sanctions that deal with Russian banks and elite Russian oligarchs.
Asked by a reporter if he had reached out to China concerning the invasion of Ukraine, Biden confessed, “I’m not prepared to comment.”
Reporters pressed Biden to provide an answer as to why the sanctions did not apply to S.W.I.F.T., but Biden maintained that it is an open option to do so in the future and that the European Union did not go along with adding it into the sanctions being imposed.
Biden quickly shifted gears by declaring that the sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have agreed to implement are greater than the S.W.I.F.T. had sanctions been opposed on it.
Later in the day, U.S. Senator Mark Warner from Virginia stated on TV that the reason that European nations balked on adding S.W.I.F.T. to the sanctions is that the U.S. only imports $28 billion from Russia while those European nations import $300 billion.
Biden made it clear that no U.S. troops would be sent to help defend Ukraine. He stated emphatically that only NATO countries will be defended with the help of U.S. troops and that he is sending more U.S. military personnel to Europe to increase NATO’s defense capabilities.
Asked by a reporter what he thinks Putin is threatening by Putin’s statement that if the West joins in to help Ukraine fight against Russia that never before seen consequences will take place, Biden replied, “I have no idea what Putin is threatening.”
Putin who said in 2014 after annexing Crimea that kicking Russia out of S.W.I.F.T. would be an equivalent to a declaration of war against Russia.
Germany has now refused to certify the NORD Stream II pipeline that extends from Russia under the Baltic Sea more than 700 miles to the coast of Germany, and the added sanctions that Biden announced will serve NATO as its economic weapon that aims to put the Russian economy into a tailspin.
Biden also withdrew the U.S. approval of the NORD Stream II pipeline that he had lifted sanctions on after taking office, reversing Trump’s sanctions against the project that Trump had warned Germany about for becoming dependent on Russian energy.
The Russian attack came during the night on orders from Putin who had misled the world by saying that he was just sending in a peace keeping force to protect Russians in Eastern Ukraine.
Instead of a limited use of his 190,000 strong military force that he had assembled on the northern, eastern and southern borders of Ukraine, Putin launched an all-out attack from all three positions against Kharktv, Lukansk and Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine and from Belarus in the north where he had assembled an attack force.
After a night-long bombardment of the area of Ukraine, Putin sent tanks south to attack Kyiv. At the same time, Russian troops advanced on Dnipro in the south after shelling the city.
While being attacked on three sides by land, air, and sea, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted, “Russia has embarked on a path of evil, and Ukraine is defending itself.”
How well the Ukrainian military is doing at defending itself remains uncertain, but Russia knocked out Ukraine’s air defense system the first night of the attack that has dragged on through the second night with Russia’s superior forces now occupying Chernobyl after the Ukrainians put up a stiff defense.
Pro-Ukraine protesters were out in force in New York City on Feb. 24 as Putin’s forces continued to attack Ukraine from the north, east and south.
It was reported that Russia fired 150 ballistic missiles during the first night of the attack, ones that took out the air defenses and destroyed much of Ukraine’s military communications systems.
Russia took over 10 of Ukraine’s airbases overnight, and one was a 45-minute-drive from north of Kyiv, the Ukraine capital city with a population of three million. The takeover of the airbase provides Russia with a strategic location to fly in troops for its assault on Kyiv where civilians were hiding in the city’s subway system while highways leading west from Kyiv were bogged down with miles of traffic jams caused by those evacuating the city.
Before attacking Ukraine, Putin gave a lengthy televised speech during which he proved to be a history revisionist, claiming that Ukraine is and always has been a part of Russia.
Trying to create a pretext on TV for his conquest, Putin, a former KGB agent, has proven via his following actions that he continues to be a tyrant who is willing to follow in the footsteps of Hitler by invading a neighboring nation without provocation, killing civilians along the way.
Russia’s three-pronged-attack continues to be brutal, and Zelensky reported that 139 heroes, including 10 Ukrainian military officers were killed by Russians during their attack that killed all of the border guards on Zmiinyi Island where 316 were wounded in the Russian takeover.
At the press conference, Biden concluded, “It was always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary—by bullying Russia’s neighbors through coercion and corruption by changing borders by force, and, ultimately, by choosing a war without a cause.”
Putin has launched the largest ground force attack since World War II, and his thirst for power has brought him international condemnation for attacking a sovereign nation.
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