One year after Russian invasion, Condoleezza Rice warns against saying ‘time is on the Ukrainian side’

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday warned that one year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies need to get away from the phrase ‘time is on the Ukrainian side’ because Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to believe otherwise.

Rice, who served under former President George W. Bush, made the remarks on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ while speaking about how the Biden administration ‘sometimes seem[ed] to be a little bit behind’ in providing Ukrainian troops with the necessary training and equipment to continue fending off Russia.

‘But to the degree that [training and equipment] can be accelerated, I think it will help because I think we have to get away from the phrase time is on the Ukrainian side. I would be careful about that,’ Rice said. 

‘Vladimir Putin seems to believe that time is not on the Ukrainian side,’ she continued. ‘He believes if he throws in the Russian way of war, mass at the problem, poor boys from Dagestan who are just kind of cannon fodder, if he engages in terrorist activities against the Ukrainian population, he’ll wear the Ukrainians down, he’ll wear us down, he’ll wear the Europeans down. I don’t think that’s right. But we have to do everything that we can to convince him that it is indeed wrong.’

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022. The toll continued to grow on the one-year anniversary on Friday, according to Ukraine’s presidential office, which said that Russian shelling killed another three civilians and wounded 19 others.

The Biden administration declared its solidarity with Ukraine on Friday, piling sweeping new sanctions on Moscow and approving a new $2 billion weapons package to re-arm Kyiv a year after Russia’s invasion.

The package includes more ammunition, electronic warfare detection equipment and other weapons to counter Russia’s unmanned systems, and several types of drones including the upgraded Switchblade 600 Kamikaze attack drone.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.