Biden leads new drive to cement the West’s Ukraine war effort against Putin – and Trump

Washington CNN —

President Joe Biden is leading the world’s richest democracies in sending a beefed-up message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the West will not forsake Ukraine despite political shocks casting doubts over its commitment.

Biden meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Italy on the sidelines of the G7 summit Thursday, aiming to personally reinforce a promise he spelled out last week on Normandy battlefields where fascism began to crack 80 years ago.

“We will not walk away, because if we do, Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there,” Biden said surrounded by the last surviving US veterans of D-Day and the graves of more than 9,000 of their fallen comrades. “Ukraine’s neighbors will be threatened. All of Europe will be threatened. … The autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine.”

Yet Biden’s undertaking will come up against growing concerns in Europe that he will merely be an interregnum between two Donald Trump administrations. The ex-president’s term that ended in 2021 shattered decades-old certainties that the United States will be a stabilizing force in transatlantic affairs and will always secure Europe’s security. And the “autocrats of the world” name checked by Biden will no doubt be watching on Thursday when Trump demonstrates his lock on the Republican Party by meeting GOP House members and senators on Capitol Hill. The show of authority will take place two weeks after Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a crime and less than five months before the presumptive Republican nominee will ask voters to return him to the White House.