Home › Opinion › Three signals from Moscow and Kyiv, February 2023
Three signals from Moscow and Kyiv, February 2023
Summary
A look back at how Biden's Kyiv trip, the New START suspension and a revoked decree on Transnistria fitted together.
What did the days around 22 February 2023 reveal about the direction of the war? Three developments, taken together, pointed to a conflict that was widening beyond the battlefield.
A visit made in secret
On 20 February 2023, US President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kyiv and met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Out of security concerns, his travel plans had not been made public beforehand, and only two journalists accompanied him, having been sworn to secrecy three days earlier.
Arms control suspended
On 21 February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Russia's participation in the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States. He cited the American goal of defeating Russia in the war in Ukraine as the reason. The announcement came one day after the Kyiv visit, though the reporting does not say the two were directly linked.
A decree revoked
On 22 February 2023, Putin revoked a 2012 foreign policy decree that had underpinned Moldova's sovereignty in resolving the political status of the breakaway Transnistria region. The step concerned Moldova, a neighbour of Ukraine, and removed a document tied to the framework for settling Transnistria's status.
What the sequence shows
The three events differed in kind: a presidential visit to a capital at war, the suspension of a nuclear arms control treaty, and the cancellation of a decree on a disputed region. Yet each placed the war in Ukraine in a wider setting. Washington's engagement with Kyiv was shown in person. Moscow, for its part, cited the war as grounds for stepping back from the treaty with the United States, and it altered its stance on a question concerning Moldova within the same three-day span.
For international readers, the lesson of those days lies in the breadth of the stakes as they were described at the time: nuclear arms control, the security of Ukraine's capital as a venue for diplomacy, and the status of a territory on Ukraine's border region of Moldova all featured within 72 hours.
