Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, says bombshell book

One of US’s top Russia experts allegedly made warning after CIA chief visited Moscow in last-ditch attempt to convince Kremlin not to attack

Joe Biden’s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, a new book has claimed.
One of the US President’s top Russia experts allegedly made the warning after the head of the CIA visited Moscow in a last-ditch attempt to convince the Kremlin not to attack Ukraine.
Eric Green, a former senior director for Russia and central Asia on the US National Security Council, believed figures in Moscow believed Washington would not support Kyiv because Afghanistan was left to fall to the Taliban.
“I think it reinforced Putin’s conceptions about how easy it would be,” Mr Green said, according to an account of the trip by Bob Woodward, the veteran reporter who broke the story of the Watergate Scandal.
“Here’s a military force that’s been supported by the US for decades at that stage. They just collapsed. The Americans didn’t back them up.”
In his latest book, War, released on Tuesday, Mr Woodward writes that the US delegation, headed up by CIA chief Bill Burns, left Moscow thinking Putin had made up his mind to invade Ukraine.
Mr Burns had a rare discussion with Putin on that trip in November 2021, four months before the invasion, via telephone, because the Russian leader was still concerned about Covid-19.
The CIA chief warned the Kremlin leader that the US had intelligence of his war plans and would respond with crippling sanctions that would wreak havoc to Moscow’s economy.
Putin responded by claiming Ukraine was not a real country, Volodymyr Zelensky, its president, was an illegitimate leader, and ethnic Russians were being discriminated against.
He did not at any point contest Mr Burns’ descriptions of Russia’s preparations for war, Mr Woodward wrote of their meeting.
Mr Burns reportedly left the Russian capital troubled that Putin had reached a decision on his invasion plans.
“I came away with a very strong impression that Putin has just about made up his mind to go to war,” the CIA chief wrote in a confidential cable to Mr Biden, according to the book.
Nothing his team had heard in Moscow had given them reason to believe that Putin was seeking a way out of the war.
“It is shaping up to be the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II,” Mr Burns concluded.
In addition to the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the US also believed Putin had factored in the handover of power between Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor, and her successor, Olaf Scholz in 2021 and the upcoming 2022 French elections as distractions for Europe.
Despite attempts by the US, UK and France to persuade Putin to back down, the Russian president’s troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Mr Woodward also alleges that Donald Trump has maintained relations with Putin since leaving office in 2020.
The book claims that they have spoken as many as seven times, leading its author to the conclusion Trump is a worse president than Richard Nixon, who resigned over Watergate.
Mr Woodward told a Washington Post event that he believed Trump was envious of Putin’s dictatorial powers.
“He loves the autocracy. He loves the idea that Putin has all of this power, he’s almost envious of… and of course this is part of the danger. We live in a democracy, and lots of other candidates and presidents talk about the power of democracy. Trump talks about the power of autocratic authority that you can just decide when you’re in that position, he admires it,” Mr Woodward said.