Closing summary
We’re wrapping up our live political coverage on this blog, but you can follow ongoing developments of the Ukraine crisis on the Guardian’s 24-hour live news blog here.
Here’s what happened in US politics today:
- Joe Biden said the US had reached “a new moment in this pandemic” as he announced a new Covid-19 website, and took a second vaccination booster shot at the White House.
- Biden pledged an additional $500m to assist Ukraine after speaking with the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for almost an hour by phone.
- The White House announced that any decision to scrap the Trump-era Title 42 policy of blocking asylum seekers from entering the US because of the Covid-19 pandemic would be made on public health grounds by the CDC, and not by Joe Biden.
- New sanctions were imposed on Iran by the US treasury department in response to a missile attack on the Iraq Kurdish city of Erbil earlier this month.
- Susan Collins, the Republican senator for Maine, announced she would support Joe Biden’s pick of Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman on the US supreme court.
The Pentagon says it has seen only minor “repositioning” of Russian troops as it assesses the validity of Vladimir Putin’s insistence that his country is scaling back its attacks in Ukraine.
“We have seen over the last 24 hours the repositioning of a small percentage of the troops, the battalion tactical groups that Russia had arrayed against Kyiv, probably in the neighborhood of 20% of what they had,” John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said at an afternoon briefing.
“We assess they are beginning to reposition some of those troops into Belarus. We’ve seen none reposition to their home garrison and that’s not a small point. If the Russians are serious about de-escalating, because that’s their claim here, they should send them home. But they’re not doing that, at least not yet.”
Kirby added: “Our assessment would be, as we said yesterday, they’re going to refit these troops, resupply them, and then probably employ them elsewhere in Ukraine.
