During remarks at a Democratic fundraiser Friday in Los Angeles, Biden reportedly said that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky failed to listen to his warnings about the imminent Russian invasion. “Nothing like this has happened since World War II. I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating,” he said, according to an Associated Press report. “But I knew we had data to sustain” the prediction that Putin “was going to go in, off the border.” He added, “There was no doubt, and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it.”…
In an interview this week, the former U.S. government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that officials in Kyiv see Biden’s remarks as the “start of a process to lay blame on them.”
The source said that those Ukrainian officials acknowledge they declined to act on some of Biden’s most strenuous warnings about the imminence of Russia’s invasion. As late as January 2022, Ukraine’s defense minister told his country’s parliament that there was no reason to believe that Russia would immediately invade. The different assessments held by each side reportedly became a source of friction between Biden and Zelensky, resulting in a tense call between the two leaders in late January.
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