Biden speech today free#

The gravity of the threat is why the response of the West has been so swift and so powerful and so unified, unprecedented and overwhelming. And it threatens to return to decades of war that ravaged Europe before the international rule-based order was put in place. It's nothing less than a direct challenge to the rule-based international order established since the end of World War II. It's an example, one of the oldest human impulses, using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control. There's simply no justification or provocation for Russia's choice of war. Repeatedly saying Russian troops along the border were there for training. Repeatedly saying he would not invade Ukraine. Repeatedly he asserted we had no interest in war, guaranteed he would not move. I know not all of you believed me and us when we kept saying, they are going to cross the border, they are going to attack. Russia was bent on violence from the start. But Putin and Russia met each of the proposals with disinterest in any negotiation, with lies and ultimatums. Time and again, we offered real diplomacy and concrete proposals to strengthen European security, enhance transparency, build confidence on all sides. I met with him in person, talked to him many times on the phone. In the lead up to the current crisis, the United States and NATO worked for months to engage Russia to avert war. It has never sought the demise of Russia. A criminal wants to portray NATO enlargement as an imperial project aimed at destabilizing Russia. Let us remember that the test of this moment is the test of all time.

Let us resolve to put the strength of democracies into action to thwart the designs of autocracy. He said let us have faith that right makes might. In my own country, a former president named Abraham Lincoln voiced the opposing spirit to save our union in the midst of the Civil War. And Putin has the audacity, like all autocrats before him, to believe that might will make right. His father's family was wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. President Zelenskyy was democratically elected.

Biden speech today free#

These principles are essential in a free society. The rule of law, fair and free elections, the freedom to speak, to write and to assemble. And now in the perennial struggle for democracy and freedom, Ukraine and its people are in the front lines.įighting to save their nation and their brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people. She fought her whole life for central democratic principles. America's first woman Secretary of State. She became one of the most ardent supporters of democracy in the world. In fact, it was here in Warsaw when a young refugee who fled her home country from Czechoslovakia was under Soviet domination, came back to speak and stand in solidarity with dissidence. We are, we are gathered here at the royal castle in this city that holds the sacred place in the history of not only of Europe but human kind's unending search for freedom.įor generations, Warsaw has stood where liberty has been challenged and liberty has prevailed. Mayor, members of the parliament, distinguished guests, and the people of Poland, and I suspect some people of Ukraine that are here. It reminds me of that phrase from the philosopher Kierkegaard, 'Faith sees best in the dark.' And they were dark moments. While I know he couldn't be here tonight, we're all grateful in America and around the world for Lech Walesa. Then a year later, the solidarity movement took hold in Poland. When Pope John Paul brought that message in 1979, the Soviet Union ruled with an iron fist behind an Iron Curtain. It was a message that we'll overcome the cruelty and brutality of this unjust war. In the face of a cruel and brutal system of government, it was a message that helped end the Soviet repression in the central land in Eastern Europe 30 years ago. It was a message about the power, the power of faith, the power of resilience, the power of the people. John Paul brought the message here to Warsaw in his first trip back home as pope in June of 1979.

'Be not afraid.' These were the first words that the first public address of the first Polish pope after his election in October of 1978, they were the words who would come to define Pope John Paul II.