President Joe Biden said that he had two options against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, one was to start the third world war and the other to make the government of Vladimir Putin “pay” for its actions, referring to economic sanctions.
“You have two options: start a third world war, go to war with Russia, physically; or two, make sure that the country that acts so contrary to international law ends up paying a price for having done so,” the president said in an interview with Brian Tyler Cohen.
Tyler Cohen questioned the president about Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, to which the president described the sanctions as the “widest in history”.
“I think that these sanctions, I know that these sanctions, they are the most extensive in history, and economic sanctions and political sanctions,” he said. “Russia will pay a high price for this short and long term, particularly in the long term.”
The president’s position follows his message last week when he announced the first escalation of economic sanctions and sought that Putin would become “a pariah of international politics”.
This Sunday, after reports that President Putin put Russian deterrence forces on alert, which include nuclear weapons, the White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, criticized the measure and assured that it was part of the “pattern of behavior” of the Russian president, who “invents threats” to take action.
The good news about the conflict is that Ukraine agreed to send a delegation to the border with Belarus to start a dialogue with Russian envoys, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned against accepts “preconditions” of its Russian counterpart.
So far at least 200 people have died in Ukraine for the conflict.