Biden shores up Western support for Ukraine ahead of possible big Putin announcement in his annual speech

To do this, Putin had four factors in his favor: the supposed superiority of his army, the little resistance that Ukraine had shown in the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the imagined willingness of the Russian-speaking part of the country to be “saved” from a invented indefinite threat and, as a complementary but essential element, the passivity of the West. The same West that had been undaunted by the war in Donbas for seven years and whose decline was announced in all the official media.

The US President’s visit Joe Biden this Monday to the city of kyiv is the clearest image that, one year later, everything has gone wrong for Russia: its army has been unable to maintain even the annexed territories in the first weeks of conflict, the two jewels in the crown of Russian culture in Ukraine -Kharkov and Odesa- have always remained faithful to the Kiev regime… and not only the West has not been cast aside, but has been committed to everything for Ukrainian freedom.

Seeing Biden and Zelensky stroll calmly and amicably through the streets of a Kiev full of journalists clashes with the image of the Ukrainian president taking refuge in a bunker barely twelve months ago, while Russian tanks were preparing to enter the capital and the citizens were piling up. in underground shelters to flee from the continuous bombardments. The The visit of the US president also comes with a certain sneer: hours before it occurred, the secret services notified Russia of it, lest they dare to do something about it. They have not dared, logically.

China and Putin’s great speech

Now, if Biden has chosen February 20 to stand in kyiv, it is not only because of the mystique of the anniversary. There are multiple signs that the conflict is about to enter a new, much more dangerous phase. To begin with, we have, for weeks -as happened in 2022- the threat of a second major offensive we don’t know if it will come from Kreminna, from Mariupol or if Putin and Gerasimov have another idea in mind.

[Borrell avisa de que Ucrania está en peligro si la UE no acelera el envío de municiones]

Besides, this Tuesday, February 21, is the day of the great address to the nation of President Putin, announced weeks ago. The expectations are enormous and nobody seems to know where the shots are going to go: will he announce a partial but sufficient victory a year after the start of the “special operation”? Will he call up a new wave of mobilized appealing to the need to maintain the war against the West?, will he have an ace up his sleeve in the form of a military alliance with China?

We know, because they have stated so, that this last hypothesis is of great concern to the US intelligence services. they dropped it Anthony Blinken and Kamala Harris at the recent Munich Security Conference and the subject has not ceased to be insisted on: Xi Jinping it would be considering sending weapons to Russia to support its campaign in Ukraine, thus abandoning the neutrality that it has presumed until just two days ago.

What better time to announce this alliance than coinciding with the visit of Wi Yang, head of Foreign Affairs of the Asian country? Wi, who in Munich accused the United States of wanting to return to a Cold War state between the great superpowers of the planet, arrived in Moscow on Monday. We do not know if his idea is to dissuade Putin from escalating the conflict -China has very little to gain in said Cold War, rather it would lose everything it has been building in the last two decades- or if, due to strategic interests, it is there to show your support.

In the footsteps of JFK

The second, without a doubt, would be worrying and difficult to explain. China has always upheld the territorial integrity of countries as the basis of the status quo. In fact, throughout this time, it has shown its discomfort with the Russian invasion, without going so far as to openly condemn it in international forums. His confrontations with the United States regarding Taiwan and the spy balloon crisis may have changed Xi Jinping’s mind, but it would be a very abrupt change, hence precisely the concern.

[Putin, ante el estado de la nación: los fallos militares en Ucrania lastran sus ansias de victoria]

It is one thing to do nothing in defense of a country that has been attacked and another is to turn in favor of the aggressor. The United States has been threatening China for months so that it does not take that step, but has never specified what these threats would translate into. Nor is it clear that possible Chinese aid will do much good on the front lines. It will certainly relieve the badly damaged Russian army and its allies, but Beijing is unlikely to get involved in such a way as to leave its own defense flanks unprotected in the increasingly hot Pacific Ocean.

In any case, it is clear that in Washington they fear something and that is why they have decided to go ahead. This same Monday, the social media account of the Russian embassy in Spain spoke of a possible Ukrainian “false flag attack” with radioactive materials to later blame Russia. It is the strategy that the Kremlin has always used before a major attack: accuse the opponent of being responsible. It is still a tweet, but it comes from an official source and at a very complex time.

Whatever Russia does and whatever China decides, Biden wanted to show that, in this second phase, if it comes, they will face him again, with what that means. Just as we recently compared the current president with john fitzgerald kennedy Due to his management of the Russian nuclear threat, similar to that of the 1961 missile crisis, his trip to Kiev inevitably refers us to what the Democratic president did to West Berlin in 1963, two years after the start of construction of the wall . “Ich bin ein Berliner”, JFK said then and went down in history. No need for speeches this Monday Biden has lived up to the times… waiting for what happens this Tuesday.