Biden claim that Zelenskyy `didn't want to hear' warnings about invasion hits nerve

Ukrainian officials Saturday publicly rejected President Joe Biden's claim that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “didn't want to hear” early warnings about a Russian invasion.

Zelenskyy's high-profile wartime leadership has won praise at home and abroad, but criticism also quietly has been brewing in Ukraine over his government's preparations for war and his public comments discounting an imminent invasion just days before it happened, the issue Biden touched on with a remark Friday.

“I know a lot of people thought I was exaggerating,” Biden said at a fundraiser for the Democratic Party, “but I knew we had data.”

He added, “There was no doubt, and Zelenskyy didn't want to hear it, nor did a lot of people.”

Zelenskyy won an election in 2019 on a promise to find a negotiated peace in the war with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Once in office, he pursued a policy of disengagement at the front line, intended to smooth talks but ultimately resulting in Ukrainian troops pulling back in some spots with no diplomatic softening from Russia as a result.

Zelenskyy also acquiesced to a German diplomatic formula to settle the conflict that widely was seen as favoring Russia's interests.

And in the year before the current war, his government focused on road building rather than military spending. None of it helped prevent President Vladimir Putin of Russia from massing troops on the border with Ukraine. And in February, Zelenskyy played down the possibility of an invasion.

A top aide to Zelenskyy, Mykhailo Podolyak, retorted Saturday in an interview with Interfax that it was “senseless to blame a country that for more than 100 days is resisting the might of the Russian aggressor if the key countries of the world could do nothing preventive to stop Russia” from invading in the first place. The Ukrainian leadership and Zelenskyy understood Russia would strike militarily, Podolyak said, with the only question being the scale of the attack.

He cited the Ukrainian army's swift reaction to the invasion as a sign that Zelenskyy had been prepared for war.