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As Ukraine crisis unfolds, Biden shows he’s not in Putin’s league

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Newt Gingrich Former House Speaker; Chairman of Gingrich 360
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With the Russian invasion of Ukraine now officially underway, worldwide attention is focused on Eastern Europe amidst fears of a world war. Ukrainians who fought Russia back in 2014 are picking up arms once again to defend their homeland. While this is all playing out, Vladimir Putin continues to play President Biden like a fiddle. It almost seems like embarrassing the leader of Russia’s greatest enemy is as important as annexing Ukraine in his latest maneuver. He’s doing a good job of it, too.

 If you watch President Putin in his speech to the Russian people, which is a really long speech, if you watch him as he maneuvers every single day, you know this is the guy, gets up in the morning, and he’s having fun. 

He wants to know how he can stick another needle into the West, how he can cause a little more pain in Ukraine, how he can dance around Biden, who is so slow and so lacking in understanding that he’s totally out of his league here. 

What you have is a guy who barely plays tic tac toe against a guy who’s playing four dimensional chess. 

The toothless sanctions Biden announced the other day, targeting banks and wealthy Russians, aren’t going to deter Putin from moving forward with his occupation of Ukraine. We’ve seen failed sanctions like this many times over the years.

Plus, the U.S. has been undermining Ukraine at every turn, basically acknowledging the Russians were going to invade and doing little about it but public posturing.

Even worse, Biden’s policies have only helped Putin grow his war chest because his anti-oil agenda has helped increase the price of Russia’s most valuable commodity: oil.

If the people of Ukraine and the rest of the world are looking for Biden to stop Putin, they will be sorely disappointed.

We’re watching a struggle between Vladimir Putin, who is having the time of his life and  president Biden, who seems totally confused and lost.

If you watch president Putin in his speech to the Russian people, which is a really long speech, if you watch him as he maneuvers every single day, you know this is the guy gets up in the morning and he’s having fun. 

He wants to know how he can stick another needle into the West, how he can cause a little more pain in Ukraine, how he can dance around Biden, who is so slow and so lacking and understanding that he’s totally out of his league here. 

What you have is a guy who barely plays  tic tac toe against a guy who’s playing four dimensional chess. 

And you see this day after day after day, and it’s gonna get worse because every time we fail to respond effectively, we increase the space in which Putin can maneuver.

And I think you’re gonna presently see him gradually gobble up Ukraine and begin to pressure Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Remember, Estonia is essentially a suburb of St. Petersburg, and it’s very close, and so it’s a real irritation to Putin to have those countries in NATO.

His goal is to drive NATO west, ideally to get the Americans off the European continent, and he has no shame.

So now having occupied part of Ukraine, he’s now called on the Ukrainian president to demobilize and demilitarize. Basically saying, “I could occupy you with so much less trouble if you would just abandon your army.” 

You look at what Biden is doing. Somebody said to me that Biden has done for the Ukrainian border, what he has done for the American border – made it totally unmanageable.

And I think that you’re gonna see the Americans, frankly, have worked overtime to make Ukraine look hopeless. 

We take our diplomats out. We have the chairman of the joint chiefs say that the Russians could be in Kyiv in three days. We basically are sending signals to not invest there. 

I mean, we aren’t creating an economic blockade of Ukraine by our policies. So we’re undermining and weakening Ukraine at the very moment that we’re doing nothing effective about Russia. And in fact, just the opposite. 

“As I said last week, defending freedom will have costs.”

Biden’s anti-oil, anti-gas policy, when it drives up the price of oil, that’s the largest single source of Russian foreign exchange. 

So it’s now worth about a billion dollars a day to Putin to have oil at the current price, which gives him tons of money to play these games with. 

So Biden has managed to adopt a policy which hurts the American people who are paying more for energy while it helps our Russian opponents. 

Now that is not easy. And it tells you what a total mess we’re currently in and on my judgment, it’s gonna get worse, not better. And I think this is gonna be a very challenging couple years.

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