Biden and Putin Have Dueling Messages on the Mutiny in Russia
“We were not involved,” Mr. Biden insisted. “We had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”
There is no evidence that the United States played any role in the uprising, even though American officials caught wind of the impending conflict days before it began to unfold. But Mr. Putin’s arguments that this was a Western plot may well accelerate in the coming weeks, officials say, in part because NATO is convening an annual summit in two weeks in Vilnius, Lithuania — just 20 miles or so from the border of Belarus, where Mr. Putin says he is about to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. It will be the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians have based part of their arsenal outside the country.
The meeting has been long planned. But the lead item on the agenda is how to word political promises to Ukraine about how, and perhaps when, it might expect to join NATO. It was just such a drifting to the West, and toward the alliance, that contributed to Mr. Putin’s drive to invade the country last year.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, anticipating and undermining Russian information operations has been a key element of Mr. Biden’s strategy.
That was why the president, over the objection of many in the intelligence agencies, decided to rapidly declassify intelligence in the fall of 2021 that Mr. Putin was planning to invade Ukraine. It lay behind American efforts to gather evidence of Russian war crimes in Bucha, and Ukrainian efforts to warn of Russian plots to cause some kind of radiation incident at the now-deactivated Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which Russian forces occupy.
Source: The New York Times
