Few nations elicit such fatalism among American policymakers and analysts as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For some, the country is an irredeemable pariah… - Victoria Nuland

I think that's most important is that we are listening to the Ukrainians as this war changes. Russia, as you know, is now planning to mass its forces from the east and come in heavy that way, which changes what they need. They need our -- heavy artillery. They need long range rocket systems. They need anti-ship missiles of the kind that they were able to use on the Russian ship in the Black Sea, the Moskva, their flagship, just a couple of days ago. And that's what we and our allies are assembling and continuing to get into Ukraine as these Ukrainians fight so bravely for their freedom, but also for the principle of freedom and sovereignty for all of us....
What I would say is, as you -- as you made clear at the top of your story, the United States has provided more than $3 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine. Our allies have matched that. So, double that amount over the course of this year. We were also the first to warn that Russia would invade Ukraine, starting as far back as late October, November. I think even the Ukrainians couldn't imagine the horror of what is happening now. But I think it's a direct result, not only of their bravery and their courage and their skill on the battlefield, but the fact that we've been working with them and training them, as have other NATO allies, for some eight years that they are able to stand up to the onslaught of the Russian army.

Because I had seen our best efforts to forestall a violent choice by Putin fail in ’14, I was more prepared than many... Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., ...that he would actually take this step. The fact that we found the [Russian war] plans when we did — and they were as robust as they were... gave us the time that we needed to prepare. A lot of us were veterans of 2014, ’15 and ’16, and felt that if we had done more faster then to help Ukraine, we might have had a better result... The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed... We were preparing for many scenarios in which the Ukrainians essentially had to get Kyiv back...We didn’t know which scenario we were going to be looking at... There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen... None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days... All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist... we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive.

I would say it starts with showing up, which is what we’re doing today – coming to Africa, engaging here with our partners both in government and the NGO sector and in the business sector to talk about what more we can do together. But it is also, as I said at the – during the opening, about embedding our Africa strategy in our larger strategy to strengthen the democracies, strengthen our partnerships, strengthen our multilateral approach to common challenges, whether they are health challenges, economic challenges, or security challenges, and to do them together; and also, to encourage and support African-led efforts to solve African problems, again, whether they’re in the security realm or whether they’re working to integrate economies, build infrastructure, recover from COVID, all of those kinds of things. So that’s how – those are the – that’s the main difference. I think you will likely see President Biden invite African leaders to convene sometime in 2022. You’ll see a lot more travel. I am the appetizer – let’s put it that way – and hopefully folk who are even – who are more senior than I am, we are laying the table here.