DM Monitoring
WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden said that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine, expressing hope that Kyiv’s counter-offensive would force Moscow to the negotiating table.
As Russia launched fresh strikes and a new bout of nuclear-sabre rattling, Biden said there was no real prospect of Putin using nuclear weapons and insisted the war would not drag on for years.
Biden also used a visit to Finland, NATO’s newest member, to pledge that Ukraine would one day join the alliance, despite NATO leaders failing to give Kyiv a timeline at a key summit this week.
“Putin’s already lost the war. Putin has a real problem,” Biden told a press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. “There is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine.”
NATO leaders had dashed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s hopes for a clear timeline to join the military alliance, saying at this week’s summit in Vilnius that they would offer an invite only when “conditions are met”. But while Biden said no country could become a NATO member while it was at war — with Ukraine joining now meaning a “third world war” — he vowed Kyiv would one day join the club.
“It’s not about whether or not they should or shouldn’t join. It’s about when they can join, and they will join NATO,” Biden said. Putin told journalists Thursday that if Ukraine were to be admitted to NATO, it would “in general make the world much more vulnerable” and boost global tensions. Moscow also launched another aerial assault on Ukraine, injuring four people, while Kyiv said it had destroyed 20 Russian attack drones and two cruise missiles. Senior Ukrainian military officials meanwhile said they had received controversial cluster munitions promised by the United States. “We just got them, we haven’t used them yet, but they can radically change (the battlefield),” Ukrainian army commander Oleksandr Tarnavskyi told US broadcaster CNN.
In a sign of its anger at Western backing for Kyiv, Moscow said it would regard F-16 fighter jets sent to Ukraine as a “nuclear” threat because of their capacity to carry atomic bombs.
“Russia cannot ignore the ability of these aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. No amount of assurances will help here,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying by the Russian foreign ministry.
But Biden played down the latest bout of nuclear rhetoric from Russia.
“I don’t think there’s any real prospect… of Putin using nuclear weapons. Not only has the West but China and the rest of the world has said don’t go there,” he said.
