For Joe Biden to safely visit Ukraine, the White House spirited him out of the country in the middle of the night and made reporters traveling with him swear a temporary oath of secrecy – none of which could protect the president from attacks by Republicans.
The journey was only complicated further by an unexpected announcement. In a speech marking a year since he sent his armies over Ukraine’s borders in an ill-fated attempt to take Kyiv, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced his country would no longer participate in the last nuclear arms control treaty with the United States still standing, and accused the west of posing an existential threat to his country.
“They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities,” Putin said, accusing Washington of striving “to build an American-style world where there is only one master”.
Biden continues his travels in Poland, but conservative Republicans have scrambled to downplay the president’s decision to travel to an active foreign war zone without a significant American military presence, arguing in appearances on Fox News that Biden would have been better off visiting the border with Mexico, or the Ohio town stricken by toxic waste spilled from a derailed train.
“The president’s now spent more time in Kyiv than he has at our southern border,” said Kevin Hern, a House Republican from Oklahoma who chairs the influential Republican Study Committee.
Fellow House Republican David Kustoff gave Biden “kudos” for the trip but brought up the derailment earlier this month of a train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, a village of 4,761 residents where many are demanding answers about the spill’s health effects.
“There are a lot of people here in the US that would say he probably should have gone to Ohio and visited with the people who have been afflicted by the derailment first,” Kustoff said on Fox News.
On Twitter, the rightwing lawmaker and Ukraine foe Marjorie Taylor Greene said Biden “chose Ukraine over America, while forcing the American people to pay for Ukraine’s government and war. I can not express how much Americans hate Joe Biden.”
The comments from Republicans were, in many ways, business as usual for the Biden presidency. The GOP has hammered him since practically the start of his administration for the increase in migrant arrivals on the southern border, and more recently seized on the East Palestine derailment to argue his administration is turning a blind eye to an environmental disaster.
“That was the biggest slap in the face. That tells you right now he doesn’t care about us,” East Palestine’s mayor Trent Conaway said of Biden’s Ukraine trip in an appearance on Fox News.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Tuesday it would take over the response to the 3 February derailment in the eastern Ohio town, with Biden’s EPA chief Michael Regan vowing rail operator Norfolk Southern “will pay for cleaning up the mess they created and for the trauma they’ve inflicted on this community”.
Last month, Biden visited Texas’s border with Mexico shortly after he announced new restrictions on migrants who arrive in the United States, which drew opposition from advocacy groups and progressive Democrats.
But the comments from the Republican lawmakers could also be harbingers of major political battles to come. Since Russia’s invasion, the US has supplied Kyiv with about $30bn worth of pivotal weaponry and other aid, but the country will likely need more to hold off Moscow’s troops. That will require the agreement of both the Biden administration and his Democratic allies controlling the Senate, as well as the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives.
“We’re all for Ukraine, we support their effort against the Russians as we approach the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, but the message that I get from constituents all across west Tennessee and I think other members of Congress get is, we need to stop the spending,” Kustoff said. “We need to take care of people at home first before we look to take care of people across the world.”
The sentiment wasn’t unanimous among Republicans. GOP senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement that he was “very pleased that President Biden took the time and effort to visit Ukraine”, and called it “the right signal to send at the right time”.
He urged the Biden administration to keep pressure on Russia by designating it a state sponsor of terrorism, and to send advanced fighter jets to Ukraine.
“Words are powerful, but they must be followed by powerful actions as well,” Graham said.
