President Joe Biden previously said that he holds the Obama administration accountable for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which culminated in Moscow seizing control of the Crimean Peninsula.
According to Watergate journalist Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, War, Biden expressed discontent during a private conversation late last year over how his former running mate handled Russian troops invading Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in February 2014. At the time, Biden was serving as vice president under former President Barack Obama.
“They f***** up in 2014,” Woodward quoted Biden saying to a close friend in December 2023, according to the Associated Press, who obtained a copy of Woodward’s book before its publishing date on October 15. “Barack never took [Russian President Vladimir Putin] seriously.”
Biden is also quoted as telling the friend that the White House “never should have let Putin just walk in there” and that Washington “did nothing” when Russia invaded.
Former President Donald Trump has also pointed blame at the Obama administration’s handling of Putin’s invasion, which boiled over into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. During a press briefing in 2018, Trump told reporters that he had “a very good meeting” with Putin earlier in the year, during which the pair “discussed about…the fact that President Obama allowed a very large part of Ukraine to be taken” in 2014.
“That was President Obama’s regime,” Trump added during the briefing.
Newsweek reached out to the White House press office via email on Tuesday night for comment.
Biden and Trump have repeatedly disagreed over how the U.S. should handle the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. The current White House administration has stood firm in supporting Ukraine through aid packages and defense boosts. Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has also vowed a similar commitment to securing Ukraine’s sovereignty if elected to the Oval Office in November.
Trump, however, has been much more elusive as to how he plans to address the war in Ukraine if he wins a second term in the White House. He, along with some Congressional Republicans, has been critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the consistent flow of aid to Ukraine, including saying during a rally in North Carolina last month, “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refused to make a deal, Zelensky.”
The Crimean Peninsula has served as a key military hub for Russia since 2022. Ukraine’s defense forces have repeatedly targeted infrastructure on the peninsula in their efforts to defend against Putin’s latest invasion.
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