“The line was not in Biden’s prepared remarks, a separate White House official said.”

Bullshit.

I suspect this speech was written for him by some neocon douchebag in the State Department. Biden probably had no idea what he was reading from the teleprompter. When he speaks off the cuff, he seems to have more restrained views on Ukraine/Russia, but the issue is who is really running his administration?

The Russia/Ukraine conflict is between two border states with conflicting interests. Those kinds of conflicts happen all the time. But the Americans want to make it into World War Three. It is reasonable that NATO and the EU are concerned about this situation because the war is taking place next door to NATO/EU countries with a mutual defense agreement. So if Russia were to invade Poland, the Baltic States, or Romania, then NATO and the EU are treaty-bound to defend those countries. But there has already been a series of overreaches.

The impact of the sanctions so far is that they are making Russia more dependent on China by an order of magnitude, strengthening the BRICS trade alliance, and distracting the West, particularly the USA, from its focus on the trade war with China as a rising competitor. Some evidence indicates that Chinese nationalists are welcoming the war in Ukraine. It appears to me, at least for now, that China’s position is being strengthened by all this. In fact, it may create a pretext for China to move against Taiwan.

Indiscriminately arming the Ukrainian resistance is going to create the blowback of having a far-right/fascist regime in Ukraine, in the midst of Europe. Using Poland as a launching base for airstrikes on Russian forces brings Poland, and therefore the entirety of NATO and the EU, into the war. And the spectacle of the Americans pushing for regime change in Russia poses an existential threat to the Russian state, which according to Russian nuclear doctrine legitimizes their use of nukes.

By Kevin Liptak and Maegan Vazquez, CNN