President Biden criticized President Trump’s approach to ending the war in Ukraine as “modern-day appeasement,” saying no concession to Russia will dissuade its leader from trying to retake its neighbor.
In a sit-down interview with the BBC on Monday, Biden was asked about Trump saying that Ukraine will have to cede some territory to Russia in order to achieve peace.
“Some people think that is common sense to say that,” the BBC’s Nick Robinson said in the interview. “Do you think it’s not common sense? It’s perhaps modern-day appeasement?”
“It is modern-day appeasement,” Biden said, a nod to British and French policy toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler was allowed to annex Sudetenland in the hope of staving off a larger war.
“Look, listen to what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin said when he talked about going from Kyiv into Ukraine and why. He can’t stand the fact that the Russian dictatorship that he runs, that the Soviet Union has collapsed,” Biden said.
“And anybody who thinks he’s going to stop is just foolish,” Biden added.
Putin has described his invasion into Ukraine as an effort to reclaim “Russian” territory and has called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
