Biden believes that Russia will eventually enter Ukraine with its troops

The American President, Joe Biden, admitted on Wednesday that he had made some mistakes in his first year in power, while predicting that Russia will invade Ukraine and generated confusion about what the West’s response will be.

In a nearly two-hour press conference, Biden made balance of his mandate so far regarding the pandemic, the economy and inflation, pending bills on social spending and voting rights, as well as relations with Latin America, Russia, China, Iran and Yemen.

“It has been a year of challenges, but it has also been a year of enormous progress,” said the president, who celebrates his first anniversary at the White House this Thursday.

At the international level, Biden predicted that Russia will end up “entering” Ukraine with its troops, and considered it “possible” to hold another summit with the Russian president, Vladimir Putinto try to reduce tensions.

Although he warned that Putin “has never seen sanctions like the ones I have promised will be imposed” on Ukraine, he also caused confusion by insinuating that the West’s response might not be so harsh if Moscow opts for some measure that does not involve a full-scale invasion.

That statement caused alarm in Ukraine, where an official source told CNN that it appeared that Biden was “giving the green light Putin to enter” the country as long as it was a “minor incursion”.

The failures of the first year

Although Biden denied that he had “promised too much” in his electoral campaign and said that he had done things “better than expected” given the circumstances, he acknowledged that there is much “frustration and fatigue” due to the covid-19 pandemic.

He admitted that his government should “have done more tests before”, especially given the peak in infections that the arrival of the omicron variant of covid-19 has generated in the United States, but he said that the important thing is that now there is more evidence of available antigens.