QUESTION: And joining me now is the Secretary of the State Antony Blinken. Secretary Blinken, welcome back to Meet the Press.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thanks, Chuck.
QUESTION: Based on everything you had hinted at, and U.S. intelligence had hinted at, between yourself and the President, has the invasion already begun?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, it certainly looks like everything we said was likely to occur in the leadup to the actual invasion is happening. We’re seeing false flag operations taking place in eastern Ukraine, the manufacturing of provocations and justifications for Russia to go in. We just heard this morning that “exercises” that – and I put that in quotation marks – that Russia was engaged in in Belarus with 30,000 Russian forces that were supposed to end are now not ending because of the alleged tension in eastern Ukraine that, of course, is being created by Russia and its proxies there.
So, all of this seems to be following the script that I laid out at the United Nations Security Council and that President Biden talked about to the nation just the other day.
QUESTION: I want to get you to respond to President Zelenskyy in Munich over the last 24 hours. He’s clearly frustrated, and he essentially said, well, if you’re so sure the invasion is here, you’re telling me that it’s 100 percent that the war will start in a couple of days, well, then, what are you waiting for? He’s referring to the harsh sanctions, like it’s essentially if the war has begun, then let’s go. Well?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: You also heard – Chuck, you also heard the President say that while the die may be cast, until it actually settles, until the tanks are rolling and the planes are in the air, that we’re going to try everything we possibly can to get President Putin to reverse the decision we believe he’s made and to dissuade him. Part of that is the prospect of massive sanctions. And just in Munich a day ago where we were all gathered, the G7 countries, the leading democratic economies in the world, reiterated very forcefully the massive consequences that would befall Russia and President Putin with sanctions if the aggression actually goes forward.
We continue to try to build everything we can to deter him from the course that he’s now set on. And until the last minute, there is still an option to – for him to pull back. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to prevent a war. As soon as you trigger the sanctions, of course, any deterrent effect they may have is gone. They get absorbed by President Putin, and he moves on.
QUESTION: Why do you think Putin appears to not be taking these threats seriously?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, one of the challenges that we have, Chuck, I think, is that we all put our own frame of logic on what President Putin is doing that may not be the same frame that he has. And it’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s mind, but he has decades of built-up grievances. He has, I think, a conviction that Ukraine cannot in any way be Western-oriented, that it cannot be a successful democracy on his borders, and that fundamentally is what this is about. He wants to reconstitute if not the Soviet empire at least a sphere of influence, and if not that at least to Finlandize his neighbors.
So, our logic is very different because what we’re seeing is President Putin precipitating everything he says he wants to prevent. He’s alienated the Ukrainian people from Russia. He’s actually caused NATO to bolster itself, and we’ll continue to do that, especially if the aggression actually goes forward. And NATO is now closer to Russia than it was. And so in terms of what would appear to us logically to be his interests, he is running – everything he is doing runs counter to them. In his own logic, there may be a rationale.
QUESTION: So, if he goes through with this invasion and he goes to Kyiv, as President Biden seemed to indicate that this isn’t going to be just a limited thing, that he’s going all-in to Kyiv, then is President Zelenskyy right when he said yesterday in Munich that the security architecture of our world is obsolete?
QUESTION: The architecture is not obsolete. On the contrary, what we’re seeing is it’s actually being reinforced, again, largely because of what President Putin is doing. I just came back from Munich. I was with all our allies and partners along with the Vice President. And what the Vice President said very forcefully in Munich, and what I heard in private from all of our partners, is that NATO now is – has more cohesion, more solidarity than it’s had at any time in recent memory. Leading officials from Europe said that publicly. The Vice President certainly heard that in her meetings and in the response to her speech. So, I think we’re seeing NATO solidified, unified by the actions that President Putin has taken.
Now, having said that, this aggression from Russia against Ukraine is a direct challenge to the basic principles that have undergirded our security and our peace for decades, the notion that one country doesn’t simply go in and change the borders of another by force – that it doesn’t try to subjugate another country to its will, to force its decisions on another country, including with whom that country may associate.
So that’s exactly why we are all standing up and standing firmly against what Russia is doing, coming together not only in support of Ukraine but also to bolster NATO and to make it clear that there will be massive consequences for Russia if it continues down this course.
QUESTION: Look, President Zelenskyy also brought up the fact that this isn’t vague promises that the West made to Ukraine, that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. And one of the reasons it – one of the prompt reassurances it got was essentially of protection from the West, from Europe, from the United States. What do we owe Ukraine if Russia invades?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, first, Chuck, over the last year we’ve provided more than a billion dollars in assistance to Ukraine – in 2021, $650 million in security assistance, defensive lethal assistance. That’s more in that year than in any previous year, along with humanitarian and economic assistance. Just the other day we announced a billion-dollar loan guarantee for Ukraine. We’ve been rallying other countries to do the same thing, to support it economically, militarily, diplomatically. And if this aggression goes forward, that will continue. Support for Ukraine across the board diplomatically, militarily, and economically will not only continue, it will deepen. As the President said, we’ll double down on that.
QUESTION: Any Americans that – in Ukraine right now, will the United States Government do whatever it takes to get them out if war begins?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Chuck, we’ve been very clear for many, many weeks that in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine we will not be in a position to evacuate any remaining Americans from Ukraine. I’ve said that repeatedly. We’ve been in direct contact with every American we can possibly be in contact with – someone who is a resident, typically this is someone who is a long-term resident of Ukraine who happens to have an American passport. We’ve communicated that directly to Congress. We’ve urged them to communicate that to any Americans and groups that they’re in contact with. We’ve been repeatedly clear about this, and we have seen people leave in recent weeks.
But we are not going to be in a position – our embassy is now shuttered in Kyiv. We’ve moved it to Lviv toward – near the Polish border. We are going to do everything we can to guide Americans who want to leave, to help them get out through – by telling them the best way to do that, to support them as best we can, to have consular services available for them, for example, along the border with Poland. But in terms of an evacuation, that’s not going to happen. And by the way, that almost never happens. Every time in places around the world where for one reason or another we’ve had to shut down an embassy, Americans have remained.
QUESTION: So, the President, President Biden, indicated that Americans probably should be prepared for perhaps higher gas prices for a short period of time, if these sanctions go through. What about the issue of cyber attacks? How concerned are you that the Russians are going to attack us in cyber, if you will, to try to dissuade us from helping the Ukrainians?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: It’s certainly part of their playbook. And we’ve been engaged for many months now, first of all in helping Ukraine itself bolster its cyber defenses, and of course very much focused on doing the same for ourselves in anticipation of the possibility that Russia would engage in cyber attacks in response to us standing up to their aggression. This is a very, very dangerous game. We’re, as I said, strengthening our own defenses.
When President Biden was with President Putin in Geneva a few months ago – this was at the time of ransomware attacks, including the Colonial pipeline – and the President was conveying to President Putin how seriously we take this and the need for Russia to do something about it because those engaged in the attacks were doing it from Russian soil. And he noted to President Putin that if he were in President Putin’s shoes with this large oil and gas infrastructure, he knows how difficult it would be for President Putin, if something were to happen to that infrastructure.
QUESTION: Let me ask this question. In your assessment, why did Putin – why is he escalating with Ukraine now? Why didn’t he do this under the previous administration who wasn’t as supportive of NATO? If you just look at it observationally, if he really wanted Ukraine and he didn’t want the United States getting in the way, he perhaps had a – more of a friendlier administration in the previous one. Why do you think he didn’t act then?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: I hope you get a chance to ask him. But look, here’s what I can say. I think, and I really don’t want to put myself in his mind because that – it’s very hard to do. But I think it’s reasonable to think that as President Putin sees it, Ukraine was slipping further and further away from his grasp over time, increasingly Western-oriented, desirous of a future with Europe. And as that was continuing year after year – by the way, largely, again as a result of his actions and alienating the Ukrainians by seizing Crimea and invading via separatists the Donbas – as that was happening, it no doubt got to a point where he thought if he didn’t do something to change the dynamic, it was just going to happen.
QUESTION: It feels like that your meeting with Sergey Lavrov this week, if it happens, it means no war; if it doesn’t happen, it means war has begun. Is that the fair way to look at that meeting?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: That’s a pretty good summary, Chuck, yes. Look, we’re doing everything we can, and it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to try diplomatically to prevent a war. And so, I will leave no stone unturned to do that. I reached out to Foreign Minister Lavrov some days ago, suggested we meet this coming week in Europe to see if we can pursue conversations that would allow us to prevent a war and address the security concerns that we all have – the United States, Europe, and Russia – in that conversation. He came back and said, yeah, let’s meet. And we responded and said the meeting’s on provided you don’t invade Ukraine in the meantime.
QUESTION: So right now, that meeting’s on?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Right now, that meeting’s on.
QUESTION: Okay.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Stay tuned over the next few days.
QUESTION: Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Appreciate you coming on and sharing your perspective with us.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thanks, Chuck.
