Putin 'precipitated virtually everything he sought to prevent' with Ukraine invasion, Blinken says

Russian President Vladimir Putin has "precipitated virtually everything he sought to prevent" by launching an invasion against Ukraine to separate Kyiv from the West, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland.

"Ukraine has been a profound strategic failure for Vladimir Putin and for Russia, in so many ways," he said Wednesday.

"You now have a Russia that overall is weaker militarily, it's weaker economically, it's weaker diplomatically. Europe has severed its energy dependence on Russia. Ukrainians are more united than they've ever been. The NATO alliance is stronger, is larger and will get larger still in the weeks ahead."

Russia has repeatedly said that Ukraine's NATO aspirations — which the country still upholds, along with membership to the EU — violated its national security interests, citing it as one of the reasons behind its military campaign. NATO has previously said that Kyiv cannot join the military group while it is at active war, as that would risk immediately drawing alliance members into a broader world conflict.

The war has benefitted NATO's expansion. Witnessing Moscow's ire in Ukraine, Finland and Sweden abandoned their long-held neutrality and applied to join the military group in May 2022. Finland was welcomed into the fold in April 2023, while Stockholm's bid pends ratification from hold-outs Hungary and Turkey.

"Putin has already failed in what he set out to do: He set out to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, to subsume it into Russia. That has failed, and it cannot and will not succeed," Blinken said, noting that Kyiv's ambitions to deepen its relationship with the West and Europe need not have divorced it from Russia.

"That was not