Give Biden some credit for consistency. Whatever’s going on, it’s always someone’s fault. Even when, like his claim that Inflation is the fault of greedy companies, an obvious lie.

President Joe Biden told donors at a fundraising event in Los Angeles on Friday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “didn’t want to hear it” when U.S. officials warned him of the Feb. 24 Russian invasion. “Nothing like this has happened since World War II,” Biden said, according to the Associated Press. “I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating. But I knew we had data to sustain [Putin] was going to go in, off the border. There was no doubt, and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it,” he said.

Regular readers know I’m not Zelensky’s biggest fan, but how plausible is the idea that the leader of a smaller and weaker country threatened by Russia didn’t want to hear warnings of a Russian invasion?

Anyone with even a short memory would remember that Zelensky was warning about an invasion and urging sanctions beforehand.

What Biden is likely referring to was Zelensky trying to publicly minimize the threat of a large-scale Russian invasion. The Ukrainian government viewed this as a psychological pressure campaign to force territorial concessions. Privately, though the Ukrainian military appeared prepared and punched above its weight. U.S. intel was correct about the scope of Putin’s plans and the Biden administration has been taking a victory lap over that ever since, but it’s hard to see what that accomplished. Preemptively publicizing the information did not significantly alter the overall trajectory of Russia’s invasion plans and only alerted them that they had been penetrated. 

Biden burned whatever sources we had and accomplished nothing largely because the intel was used to try and get the Europeans to form a coalition. But the coalition really didn’t emerge until the invasion was not only underway, but had significantly increased in scope and impact. And even now it remains quite shaky.

But having that intel is Biden’s only asset and so he’s reduced to accusing Zelensky and everyone else of not listening to him. This is a pathetic display of impotence by the leader of what is supposed to be a world power.