In his address on Thursday evening on the Ukraine war, US President Joe Biden said it was a premeditated attack.
“Vladimir Putin has been planning this for months, as I’ve been — as we’ve been saying all along. He moved more than 175,000 troops, military equipment into positions along the Ukrainian border.
He moved blood supplies into position and built a field hospital, which tells you all you need to know about his intentions all along.
He rejected every good-faith effort the United States and our Allies and partners made to address our mutual security concerns through dialogue to avoid needless conflict and avert human suffering”.
Biden accused that “at the very moment that the United Nations Security Council was meeting to stand up for Ukraine’s sovereignty to stave off invasion, Putin declared his war.”
The US President stated his country had shared declassified evidence about Russia’s plans and cyberattacks and false pretexts so that there can be no confusion or cover-up about what Putin was doing, while announcing new package of sanctions against Russia.
“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences. Today, I’m authorizing additional strong sanctions and new limitations on what can be exported to Russia. This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time. We have purposefully designed these sanctions to maximize the long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our Allies.”
Twenty-seven members of the European Union, including France, Germany, Italy — as well as the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and many others — to amplify the joint impact of our response, Biden added.
“We will limit Russia’s ability to do business in Dollars, Euros, Pounds, and Yen to be part of the global economy. We will limit their ability to do that. We are going to stunt the ability to finance and grow Rus- — the Russian military.
We’re going to impose major — and we’re going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st century economy.
We’ve already seen the impact of our actions on Russia’s currency, the Ruble, which early today hit its weakest level ever — ever in history. And the Russian stock market plunged today. The Russian government’s borrowing rate spiked by over 15 percent.
In today’s actions, we have now sanctioned Russian banks that together hold around $1 trillion in assets.
We’ve cut off Russia’s largest bank — a bank that holds more than one third of Russia’s banking assets by itself — cut it off from the U.S. financial system.
And today, we’re also blocking four more major banks. That means every asset they have in America will be frozen. This includes V.T.B., the second-largest bank in Russia, which has $250 billion in assets.
As promised, we’re also adding names to the list of Russian elites and their family members that are sanctioning — that we’re sanctioning as well.
Some of the most powerful impacts of our actions will come over time as we squeeze Russia’s access to finance and technology for strategic sectors of its economy and degrade its industrial capacity for years to come.
Between our actions and those of our Allies and partners, we estimate that we’ll cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports.”
The American President also said that “although we provided over $650 million in defensive assistance to Ukraine just this year — this last year, let me say it again: Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but to defend our NATO Allies and reassure those Allies in the east. There is no doubt — no doubt that the United States and every NATO Ally will meet our Article 5 commitments, which says that an attack on one is an attack on all.”
The entire speech is available here.