Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s Remarks on the Two-Year Anniversary of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Ambassador Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary for Political Affairs

Washington, D.C.

Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS)

UNDER SECRETARY NULAND: Thank you, Max, it is very good to be here with you at CSIS; and thanks to CSIS for decades of incisive research and recommendations for policymakers. I have been a beneficiary myself over many decades. And thanks to everyone who is joining us both in-person and virtually.

Well as Max made clear, we all remember where we were two years ago in the months, and days, and hours leading up to Putin’s February 24^th, 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. U.S. intelligence, and indeed CSIS’s own reports, had been warning for months about Putin’s massive war plan and the terrible toll that could await Ukraine.

Week after week in the winter of 2021/2022, we watched the Russian military take up positions on three sides of Ukraine. The U.S., as you’ll remember, offered negotiations to try to avert Russia’s planned invasion, but those negotiations sputtered quickly, because Putin had already made up his mind.

Yet at that time, many still hoped the troop movements were just a pressure tactic, even some Ukrainians believed that.

But many feared that if Putin did order his troops in, Russia’s massive military could roll over Kyiv within a week, decapitate Ukraine’s democratic government, and install puppets of Moscow.

But that did not happen.

Instead, Putin got Newton’s third law, an equal and opposite reaction to everything he hoped to gain:

Instead of fleeing, President Zelensky led;

Instead of capitulating, Ukrainians fought;

Instead of fracturing, the West united; and

Instead of shrinking, NATO grew.

The U.S. rallied the world to Ukraine’s defense in those early hours, days, and weeks, and we have kept that global coalition of more than 50 nations united for two years standing strongly with Ukraine.

• The U.S. has provided $75 billion dollars in security, economic, and humanitarian assistance.

• Europe and our global partners have provided even more—$107 billion in addition to hosting 4.5 million Ukrainian refugees in countries across Europe. And the EU just pledged another $54 billion for Ukraine.

• Today, NATO is stronger, larger, and better resourced. Finland has joined the defensive alliance, and we’ll welcome Sweden very soon.

• Russia is globally isolated. Over 140 nations voted four times in the UN General Assembly to condemn Putin’s brutal invasion. And now Putin is reliant on countries like Iran and North Korea for weapons, while he drives his country deeper and deeper into economic and security arms of China.

• Global sanctions, the oil-price-cap, and export controls have weakened Russia’s war machine, and these restrictions will get significantly tighter in the coming days as we and our partners announce massive new sanctions packages designed, among other goals, to strangle Russia’s effort at sanctions evasion.

• In less than two years, Europe broke its dependency on Russian oil, and the U.S. doubled liquified natural gas exports across the Atlantic, helping European partners reduce their dependence on Russian gas from 40% of total consumption to just 13% today.

And despite all the immense challenges from Putin’s vicious war machine, Ukraine has survived.

• Ukraine has retaken more than 50% of the territory seized by Putin’s forces at beginning of the invasion;

• It has pushed Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol and off Ukraine’s coast allowing Ukraine to restore grain exports to pre-war levels, helping feed the world once again;

• And, remarkably, Ukraine’s economy grew by 5% last year, albeit from a pretty low war-torn base.

And in case Americans are still asking themselves, if all of this is worth it for us, let’s remember:

Without sending a single U.S. soldier into combat, and investing less than one tenth of one year’s defense budget, we have helped Ukraine destroy 50% of Russia’s ground combat power and 20% of its vaunted Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine has taken off the battlefield 21 naval ships, 102 Russian aircraft, and 2,700 Russian tanks.

By every measure, Ukraine’s bravery and strength, its resilience, has made the United States safer too.

More broadly, our continued support for Ukraine tells tyrants and autocrats everywhere:

• That we will not stand by while the UN Charter is torn to shreds;

• That we will defend the rights of free people to determine their own future, and to protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity;

• And that the world’s democracies will defend the values and principals that keep us safe and strong.

But on Ukraine’s frontlines, unless and until the U.S. joins Europe in passing our supplemental funding request, the situation remains dire.

• Artillerymen are fighting with only 10-20 155mm shells per day to defend themselves;

• Ukraine, as we saw on the news, has been forced to withdraw from Avdiivka;

• Kharkiv—one of Ukraine’s proudest Eastern cities—is bombarded daily;

• And Ukraine’s economy is still fragile with almost 100% of tax revenue going to defense now.

Valdimir Putin—in addition to planning anti-satellite weapons in space and bearing responsibility for the death of his most popular opponent, Alexei Navalny—thinks he can wait Ukraine out, and he thinks he can wait out all of us.

We need to prove him wrong.

With the $60 billion supplemental that the Administration has requested of Congress, we can ensure Ukraine not only survives but thrives.

With this support, in 2024, we will can help ensure Ukraine can continue to fight, to build, to recover, and to reform.

With this money, Ukraine will be able to fight back in the East and accelerate the asymmetric warfare that his been most effective on the battlefield. And as I said in Kyiv three weeks ago, this supplemental funding will ensure Putin faces some nasty surprises on the battlefield this year.

Ukraine can also build. With this money, the U.S. will join 31 other nations in helping Ukraine build the highly deterrent military that it needs to ensure Putin can never come back and do this again. And it will also rebuild its indigenous industrial base and ensure that it can remain on a path to European integration.

This support also ensures Ukraine can begin to recover economically and strengthen its tax base by investing in clean energy, in grains and agriculture, steel, defense infrastructure, and in getting internally displaced persons and refugees home to better jobs and safety.

One interesting thing is that Patriot systems and other sophisticated air defense systems not only provide battlefield protection, but, as we’ve seen in Kyiv and Odessa, they create bubbles of safety under which citizens can live safely and Ukraine’s economy can rejuvenate. They give people the confidence to come home.

This money also supports continued reform, strengthening governance, the judiciary, and draining the grey economy—so that Ukraine can attract foreign investment—and continuing progress on rule of law, accountability, and anti-corruption—all the things that the Ukrainian people have demanded of their government since the 2013 revolution of dignity and before.

Our supplemental support will strengthen the Ukraine of today, but also put it on a more sustainable path for tomorrow.

And by the way, most of the support we are providing actually goes right back into the U.S. economy and defense industrial base—helping to modernize and scale our own vital defense infrastructure while creating American jobs and economic growth. In fact, the first $75 billion created good-paying jobs in at least 40 states across the U.S. and 90% of this next request will do the same.

…

In December of 2022, I was in Ukraine on one of the many trips I’ve made in the last couple years, including four trips since the war began.

I visited a center in Kyiv, that the U.S. supports, which helps Ukrainian children that have been displaced by the war. There I met a young boy from Kharkiv, with bright eyes and a sweet smile, who had just lost his home to Putin’s barbarity.

As part of a therapy session, he and a handful of other kids his age were making little knit dolls out of yellow and blue yarn.

Before leaving I asked him if I could keep one.

“Da,” he said.

I then asked what the doll’s name was.

“Patriot,” he answered.

It was quiet a moment—a child making a doll, who just lost his home, thinking about patriotism.

That’s what war brings. To Ukraine and around the world.

I now keep Patriot on my desk as a reminder that the support that the United States provides is not abstract. It’s often the difference between life and death for Ukrainians on the front lines of this fight for Ukraine, and for the future of the free world.

It’s a reminder that when Putin launched this vicious campaign, with its war crimes and nuclear blackmail, he not only shattered life for Ukrainians—from Kharkiv to Kyiv to Kherson, from Dnipro to Donetsk, from Lviv to Odessa—but he laid bare the consequences of appeasing tyrants who are intent on conquest.

And here I will be blunt: we can’t allow Putin to succeed in his plan to erase Ukraine from the map of free nations.

And if Putin wins in Ukraine, he will not stop there, and autocrats everywhere will feel emboldened to change the status quo by force.

And for the U.S., the price of defending the free and open international order that we depend on, will go up exponentially.

Democracies everywhere will be imperiled.

Support for Ukraine is not simply a “nice to have,” it is a vital strategic investment in our own future.

Thanks Max and I look forward to our conversation.