Putin was playing Biden all along

 

RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT

Putin was playing Biden all along

 

The U.S. president and his aides thought they could manage Putin. Their calculations were dead wrong.

 

By NAHAL TOOSI

02/24/2022 05:00 PM EST

Updated: 02/24/2022 05:37 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/24/putin-was-playing-biden-all-along-00011555

 

For more than two decades, Joe Biden has disliked and distrusted Vladimir Putin, even claiming the Russian didn’t have a soul.

 

And yet, for the past year, Biden tried repeatedly to reason with the steely-eyed strongman.

 

When the two met last June in Geneva, Biden urged Putin to end his yearslong aggression against Ukraine and stop hacking the United States, telling Putin that he was hurting his “credibility worldwide.” In a call in December, as Putin was assembling tens of thousands of troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine, which he first invaded in 2014, Biden pushed him to deescalate and “return to diplomacy.” Earlier this month, Biden warned Putin that reinvading Ukraine “would produce widespread human suffering and diminish Russia’s standing.”

 

None of these efforts mattered. In launching a massive assault on Ukraine this week, Putin proved that he sees the world, and his interests, very differently than Biden hoped. He also proved resistant to many traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence.

 

Biden’s appeals to Putin’s geopolitical ego didn’t work. Neither did threats of sanctions, words of condemnation, emotional appeals on human rights grounds, deployments of U.S. troops to NATO countries and weapons to Ukraine, or the relatively united front put forth by the United States and its allies. Even an unusual tactic employed by the Biden administration — publicizing significant amounts of intelligence about Putin’s plans — didn’t stop the dictator.

 

And actions that might have — maybe — changed Putin’s calculus, such as deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine itself, were not ones Biden would consider.

 

For Biden and his team, it is a deeply frustrating moment. Their strategy toward Russia has largely failed, despite their effort to adjust it over time to account for Putin’s stubborn moves. The Ukraine attack and the risk of a larger war in Europe also bodes ill for the administration’s ability to focus on other priorities going forward, in particular the challenge of a rising China.