Following a trip to Kyiv, where they met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to vow US assistance in the battle and announce that US ambassadors would be returning to Ukraine, the two senior US officials spoke at a news conference in an unknown location in Poland near the Ukrainian border.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin said at the news conference. “So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
Blinken told reporters that Russian attempts to “subjugate Ukraine and take its independence” have “failed.”
“Russia has sought as its principal aim to totally subjugate Ukraine, to take away its sovereignty, to take away its independence — that has failed. It has sought to assert the power of its military and its economy. We, of course, are seeing just the opposite, a military that is dramatically underperforming and an economy … as a result of sanctions that is in shambles,” Blinken said.
“We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a sovereign independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene,” he said.
The comments are the latest in a string of public statements by US leaders questioning Putin’s ability to stay in power in Russia, as the war in Ukraine has taken on a new tone in the east. The White House and US President Joe Biden have stated that the US is not formally pushing for regime change, and authorities have forecast a long battle.
Austin’s remarks appear to be a continuation of US objectives, building on previous remarks from Blinken and other officials on Moscow’s standing after the end of the war.
“Continued efforts to ratchet up pressure on Putin’s disintegrating economy combined will help undermine the Russian Government’s position and further isolate them from the world until Russia quits its unprovoked and illegitimate assault on Ukraine,” Blinken said in a statement last week.
Austin was speaking about the US “aim to prevent” the Russian military from taking over Ukraine, according to the White House, which defined it as consistent with the administration’s long-held goal.
When asked about the defense secretary’s remarks, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council stated the US wants Ukraine to prevail, and “that’s why we’re doing everything we can to help Ukraine defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity and to strengthen the Ukrainians’ hands on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.”
A senior State Department official told the traveling press Monday that such negotiations are “evolving,” noting that “Russia’s hand has been weakened as a result of these first two months, Ukraine’s hand has been strengthened, that affects the positions that there would be in any negotiation,” but “part of the problem is as best we can tell there is no effective negotiation going on right now.”
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