Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin met face to face for the first time in March 2011, in Moscow. The first was then vice president of the United States and had the mission of convincing the Russian — prime minister, at the time — that he should not fear the new deployment of missile launchers in Europe, which were intended to intercept possible attacks from Iran. Biden recalled that when George W. Bush met Putin, he said he had looked into his eyes and caught “an insight into his soul.” Biden found nothing during that fruitless appointment. When he finished, he smiled at his host and said: “Mr. Prime Minister, I am looking you in the eye. I don’t think you have a soul.” The other replied: “I see we understand each other.”
The Crimean War would break out three years later. Biden had seen first-hand the protests against the pro-Russian government during a trip to kyiv and helplessly contemplated the subsequent illegal annexation of that peninsula. Then the breaches of the Minsk treaty. He was hung up on the phone by the Ukrainian crisis last Thanksgiving that he spent with his son Beau, sentenced for cancer. The Democrat recounts all these episodes in Promise Me, Dad, a memoir of the year of Beau’s fight against the tumor, which coincided with the deliberation on running for the 2016 presidential elections. In them, Putin is an omnipresent character. Beau died in 2015. Biden did not appear in the elections. Then came Donald Trump.
The putinologists have established that Ukraine is almost personal to Putin. Putin and Ukraine are also a personal account for Biden. Seven years later, history has brought the political veteran, almost octogenarian, face to face again against one of his black beasts, in the midst of a monumental European crisis. Faced with less promising forecasts, the storm has strengthened the battered transatlantic ties after the stormy Trump era, something that can only be understood from a double movement by Washington.
Biden, who is traveling this week to Brussels and Poland, first launched a risky diplomatic gamble, that of sharing arsenals of intelligence information with European and NATO allies about the Kremlin’s plans, multiplying senior officials’ trips to Europe during the months before the invasion to discuss sanctions. He publicly sounded alarm bells that the attack was imminent. He aired the possible punishments that he would apply. Then, once the war started, he took a step back and gave the leading role to the European partners.
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