Ben Rhodes: Putin thought he would get to Kyiv before Biden

Then the national security adviser was the basically the only other White House official. The others were communications officials traveling with the president on the secret mission to Ukraine. What do you believe that that mission accomplished? Well, I think Lawrence, you know, one year is a time to take stock and symbolically important and substantively important. And if you'll recall in the early days of the war, there were reports that some of those Russian forces sent into Kiev were planning military parades. Vladimir Putin clearly thought he was going to get to Kiev before Joe Biden. And so I think the basic symbolic victory of that visit essentially is underscoring that Kiev is still there because of what the Ukrainian people have done, because of what the Ukrainian military has done, and because of the support of the United States and NATO. And so for the present United States to be there, a city that Vladimir Putin would very much like to have visited in the last year, I think sends a message about Russia's failure to achieve its basic objectives at the beginning of this war.

Now, that doesn't mean we're out of the woods, though. And therefore he had to build over a message that we're in this for the long haul because there still is a brutal and grinding war in eastern and southern Ukraine right now. There was an interesting architecture to the secret trip. In the past, if this kind of thing happened, it usually happened at the end of a foreign trip where at the very end of the trip, the president would then slip off into the place unannounced where the president was going to go. See it at the very beginning. Now today looks all the more important because it allows President Biden to go into the discussions in Poland to rally the alliance with the knowledge they all have that he was just there and that he's bringing that spirit of Kiev right into the discussions in Poland. That's right.

And look, nothing he could have said today could have been as powerful as the images of him in the center of Kiev with President Zelensky. That's the message to every European capital and back here in the United States that we are in this, we are with Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are standing on their own two feet despite weathering a year of the worst kind of bombardments that we've seen in Europe since World War II. And look, these trips are very hard to pull off. I mean, I was involved in planning several secret trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Here you at least have the U.S. military as the host.

Here I think what you have is a situation where we're going into a war zone where the U.S. is not an active participant. And we're trusting, obviously, our Ukrainian partners very much with the security of our president. That in and of itself is a message of trust and solidarity that, through this 10-hour train ride into Kiev and back, we're really trusting the Ukrainians to work with us. Obviously, we have security people on the ground there, too. So I think it sends a message that, today, the speech, essentially, is reinforcing the imagery of the president of the United States saying, not only have we been here the last year, we're going to be with you going forward.

And look, let's make no mistake, this is going to be a really tough fight here. There's a war of attrition taking place in Eastern Ukraine right now. And Putin's bet is that we and the Ukrainians will tire of that war, and Joe Biden is trying to push back against that. Thank you.

Lawrence O'Donnell