U.S. President Joe Biden took less than two minutes to bring up Russia in his 2024 State of the Union address. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” Biden said, prompting a standing ovation. “But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself.”
An unwavering commitment to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia has been at the center of the Biden administration’s foreign policy for more than two years now. But Washington’s relations with Moscow and Kyiv looked very different when Biden took office back in 2021. For the inside scoop on team Biden’s Russia and Ukraine policy, and how Moscow’s 2022 invasion turned all their plans upside down, Meduza turns to Politico national security reporter Alex Ward, the author of The Internationalists: The Fight To Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.
Timestamps for this episode:
Как поддержать нашу редакцию — даже если вы в России и вам очень страшно
Returning to the talks that could have ended the war in Ukraine
How Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov dies
Migration and discrimination in Putin’s Russia
The evolution of the Russian FSB
Daniel Roher and Julia Ioffe remember the Navalnys
How terrorism’s geopolitics brought tragedy to Moscow
Is Europe preparing for a wider Russian invasion?
The Russian space nukes scare
Christopher Miller on how war came to Ukraine
The death of Alexey Navalny
Yandex’s restructuring and the future of Kremlin tech control
How Russia targets its critics abroad in wartime
How doomed presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin rallied antiwar Russians
Why hasn’t the West seized Russia’s frozen sovereign assets?
The evolution of Russia’s combat recruitment
Memories of Russia
Growing up German in Soviet Kazakhstan, with Lena Wolf
How studying Russia became a paradox
Russia’s ban on the ‘LGBT movement’
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