Biden got it right on Ukraine: The West can’t allow Russia to win

Kudos to President Joe Biden for his surprise visit to Kyiv and more so for his vow to back Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s lust to conquer. The Moscow menace’s own ravings Tuesday show that his only hope to win is for America and the West to wimp out.

Democracies “will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow and forever,” Biden promised. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.”

That’s precisely what Putin needed to hear. Hours earlier, the Russian strongman unleashed a deranged spate of bald-faced lies in defense of the war he launched a year ago.

“It was they who unleashed this war,” Putin puffed. Then why, exactly, has all the fighting been inside Ukraine? That alone tells you who shot first.

He even doubled down on his absurd claim that Kyiv is ruled by a “neo-Nazi regime.” President Volodomyr Zelensky, for the record, is still Jewish.

Nope: Putin’s the only one who wanted this war (though he fooled himself into thinking it would be easy) because he rues Russia’s loss of empire and the rapid shrinking of the Russian population.

He wanted Ukraine’s land, and its people, and he figured he could grab it all. Letting him succeed would only encourage him to keep conquering — and embolden other over-proud tyrants (cough, Xi Jinping) into their own “special military operations.”

That’s right: Putin still won’t call his war by its name, though it still smells as rank. Indeed, the reality is so obvious that even Veep Kamala Harris can state it clearly: Russia has committed multiple “crimes against humanity”: stealing Ukrainian children (as well as adults), torturing and murdering captives, targeting hospitals and generally waging war on civilians.

Yet the Kremlin is still losing: It has nearly its entire army in Ukraine now, trying to overwhelm the enemy with numbers — yet it’s making minimal gains despite huge casualties.

Hence Vlad’s return Tuesday to nuclear bluffs, accusing the West of trying to turn a “local conflict” into a “global confrontation” (when he’s the only one who’d push the button) and officially dropping out of the New START nuclear treaty (which he was cheating on, anyway).

No one on Ukraine’s side wants nukes going off, and going nuclear would be the end of Russia. The West is being plenty cautious about escalating the conflict; at this point, it should start penalizing Putin for every new threat.

Bottom line: Putin has no path to victory if the West stands strong. The only thing that will end the war is his realization that it’s just not going to work. Biden must now live up to his promise not to go wobbly — and ensure the allies don’t, either.