Biden and Putin have dueling posts over the mutiny in Russia

When President Vladimir V. Putin spoke on Monday about the insurgency threatening Moscow and its rule, he began exactly as President Biden and his national security aides expected: blaming the United States for cheering the insurgency that the Russian leader said was was intended to tear Russia apart.

“It was precisely this result – fratricide – that Russia’s enemies wanted: the neo-Nazis in Kiev as well as their Western patrons and national traitors of all kinds,” Putin said. “They wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, so that military and civilians would die, so that Russia would lose in the end and split our society, suffocated in bloody civil war.”

Just a few hours earlier, Mr. Biden tried to stifle that argument, trying to discredit Mr. Putin’s claim before it got out of his mouth.

In his initial remarks on the mutiny that has gripped his White House and much of the world, Mr Biden said his first step was to gather key allies for a video call because “we had to make sure we don’t let Putin excuse” to “blame it on the West or blame it on NATO.”

“We were not involved,” Mr. Biden insisted. “We had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”

There is no evidence that the United States played a role in the uprising, even though US officials got wind of the impending conflict days before it began to unfold. But Mr Putin’s arguments that this was a Western plot could gain momentum in the coming weeks, officials say, in part because NATO is convening an annual summit in two weeks in Vilnius, Lithuania — just 20 miles or so. from the border with Belarus. where Mr. Putin says he is about to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. It will be the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that the Russians have stationed part of their arsenal outside the country.

The meeting has been planned for a long time. But the main item on the agenda is how to make political promises to Ukraine about how, and perhaps when, it expects to join NATO. It was just such a drift to the West, and toward the alliance, that contributed to Putin’s drive to invade the country last year.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, anticipating and undermining Russian intelligence operations has been a key part of Mr Biden’s strategy.

Therefore, despite the objection of many in the intelligence community, the president decided to quickly release intelligence in the fall of 2021 that Mr. Putin was planning to invade Ukraine. It was behind US efforts to gather evidence of Russian war crimes at Bucha, and Ukrainian efforts to warn of Russian plots to cause some kind of radiation incident at the now-deactivated Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is occupied by Russian forces.

But as the uprising led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin unfolded, the White House quickly came to the conclusion that it had to get ahead of what one senior official called an “inevitable” argument by Mr. Putin that the uprising would protect the interests of the opponents of Russia, even if it was not invented by them.

Mr Biden and his allies came to an agreement this weekend on a common line of reasoning: that Mr Putin caused this crisis with his rash decision to invade a sovereign neighbor, and now he paid the price.

“Sixteen months ago, Russian troops stood on the doorstep of Kiev in Ukraine, thinking they would take the city in a few days, thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” in the administration’s first comments on Russia’s chaos.

Then, twisting the knife a little, he added: “This weekend they had to defend Moscow, the capital of Russia, from mercenaries of Putin’s own making.” He went on to say that Mr. Prigozhin “first of all raised profound questions about the premises of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, saying that Ukraine or NATO were not a threat to Russia, which is part of Putin’s narrative. “

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, was in Lithuania on Monday to prepare for the meeting, telling reporters that “the weekend’s events are an internal Russian affair, and another demonstration of the great strategic mistake President Putin made with its illegal annexation. of Crimea and the war against Ukraine.”

But then he described Putin as badly injured. “Of course it’s a demonstration of weakness,” he said. “It shows the vulnerability of the Russian regime, but it is not for NATO to intervene in those issues. That’s a Russian thing.”

Mr Biden has reason to be reluctant to become a cheering section for the uprising. First, he wanted the ruthless Mr. Prigozhin, a mercenary leader commissioned by the United States. (The Treasury Department was due to announce more sanctions, but they appear to have been postponed, so as not to be seen as support for Mr Putin.)

But White House officials also did not want to give the impression that Putin’s pain was being eased. For months they have been waiting for signs of cracks in the Russian leader’s grip on power; when they finally got one, it looked more like a geological fault line. Biden stressed on Monday that he had no idea what the next step was.

“We will continue to assess the consequences of this weekend’s events,” Biden said of the implications for Russia and Ukraine. “But it’s too early to draw a definitive conclusion on where this is headed. The final outcome of all this remains to be seen.”