How the Russia-Ukraine conflict has fundamentally changed Biden’s presidency

For weeks, President Joe Biden has started and ended his day trying to get inside Vladimir Putin’s head.

The most consequential foreign policy crisis of his young term has overwhelmed the president’s schedule, shoving everything — from the State of the Union to a Supreme Court pick — to the backburner. And while he leans on a trusted inner circle of advisers to decipher Putin’s moves, he has also relied on his own experience, having practiced diplomacy with European leaders for decades and having been able to size up Putin face-to-face a number of times.

Biden begins each day with the presidential daily briefing. On most days in recent weeks, the intelligence briefer has been joined by some of Biden’s top national security advisers: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and more.

Carrying over reading habits from his three-plus decades in the Senate, Biden dives into the briefing books and peppers his aides with questions, according to two senior White House aides. But the routine has gotten more time-consuming and frantic in recent weeks as the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine turned into a reality. Unlike his last foreign policy crisis — the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan — Biden has been forced to spend his time responding to the actions of a foreign nation rather than shaping U.S. policy there.

In recent days, Biden has attended morning meetings in the Situation Room as well as evening sessions in the Oval Office; he worked in the Treaty Room last Wednesday when aides believed a Russian invasion was imminent. Blinken, above all others, has emerged as the president’s top confidant, used as a sounding board and consigliare on how to shape U.S. policy and rally global pressure against Russia in light of its invasion. Biden has also leaned on those with vast Russian experience, including Bill Burns, the CIA director who once served as the nation’s ambassador to Moscow, and Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of State who was a top liaison to Ukraine under President Barack Obama.

But Biden also prides himself on being something of an expert on Putin himself. And, as with his approach to Afghanistan over the summer, he has stuck closely to his own instincts. There has not been any wavering about involving the U.S. military in the conflict. He has steadily drummed up sanctions rather than ripping off a massive chunk at the onset. And he has not blushed at the idea of being stern with Putin. During their summit in Geneva last summer and during their phone calls, Biden deployed a strategy of deflecting the Russian president’s famed long, winding historical digressions, rather than engaging in a tit-for-tat, aides said.

“Mr. President, I know the history. And I know you know that’s not right,” aides said Biden told Putin during one of their secure calls when the Russian president made a claim about the threat Moscow faced from NATO expansion in the 1990s. And it was in watching Putin deliver a grievance-filled speech in which he warned of “bloodshed” among the Ukrainians that Biden became convinced that an invasion was imminent despite widespread speculation that it was a bluff.

The war in Ukraine has come to dominate this moment of his presidency — an unwelcome addition to the pile of political pressures hampering the administration back home. But the White House has been determined to not let the grim news in Kyiv overwhelm it. Biden still made his Supreme Court pick a priority and kept to his pledge to announce the selection by the end of February—a non-insignificant feat for a president known to bust through deadlines.

Still, his first State of the Union speech has been rewritten repeatedly and remained unfinished the day before it was set to be delivered, according to two White House aides. Biden has squeezed in some rehearsal time but the Russia-focused late revisions have required extensive rewriting. That stands in stark contrast to the original plan, which was to use the speech to offer a domestic reset of the presidency. While Biden will still discuss inflation, falling Covid rates and his pick of Ketanji Brown Jackson for the court, Ukraine will now be a centerpiece.

The flurry of activity the last few days was actually months in the making. U.S. intelligence first noticed signs last fall of Moscow’s troop movements and began quietly alerting allies to the possibility of an invasion. Their warnings were met with widespread skepticism, as some European nations in particular did not believe Putin would go through with it. The United States’ consistent message back was: We hope you’re right but we can’t take the chance that it’s not.

Before long, the White House stopped whispering. In a concerted and highly unusual effort, it began loudly warning about Putin’s aggressive behavior. The strategy to take intelligence public in almost real-time was crafted by Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and quickly endorsed by the president who thought the effort might rattle Putin, a former KGB chief known to safeguard his secrets. It wasn’t seen as a guaranteed deterrent but a possible mechanism to slow down the Russian leader and perhaps make him reconsider.

Slowly and painstakingly, reluctant allies were brought on board. White House officials said that an agreement in principle to halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, that would supply Germany and others with Russian natural gas, was made before new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz even arrived in Washington for his meeting last week. While Scholz danced around the topic at a White House news conference, the two governments had already reached a general deal on suspending the pipeline in light of a Russian invasion. And the White House was heartened when Germany went one step further over the weekend and, in a historic step, pledged military assistance to Ukraine.

Critics have blamed the administration for being too slow to react to Putin’s aggressive behavior, or for not slapping sanctions on the Kremlin before his tanks rumbled across the Ukrainian border. But Biden and his aides have since levied historic punishments on Putin and his economy, making Russia a global pariah and reaffirming the Western alliance with a vigor not seen since the Cold War. Whether their resolve can outlast Putin’s is another question entirely.

Administration officials have been encouraged by the slow pace of Russia’s advance and the heroism on display from Ukraine’s people and its president. But they also caution that it is far too soon to celebrate, warning that Putin has forces and airpower yet to deploy and could still dramatically escalate his invasion. Aides think that it will be several more days, and likely a couple of weeks, before the course of the war is fully known.

And with the U.S. and NATO allies now overtly supplying Ukraine weapons that are expressly intended to kill Russians, the threat of a hot war between superpowers is that much greater. The American public remains opposed to getting more involved.

Biden may not be a wartime president — in fact, he campaigned on getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan — but he has also staked his presidency on the fight for democracy against authoritarian forces. The applause he receives at his primetime address, or lack thereof, will be telling.