In the lead up to the current crisis, the United States and NATO worked for months to engage Russia to avert war.

I met with them in person, talked to them many times on the phone.

Time and again, we offer real diplomacy and concrete proposal to strengthen European security, enhanced transparency, build confidence

on all sides. But Putin and Russia meant each of the proposals with disinterested

in any negotiation, with lies and all the maidens. Russia was bent on violence from the start.

I know not all of you believe me in us when we kept saying,

they are going to cross the border.

They are going to attack.

Repeatedly, he asserted we had no interest in war,

guaranteed he would not move.

Repeatedly, saying he would not invade Ukraine, repeatedly, saying Russian troops along the border were there for training, all 180,000

of them.

There are simply no justification or provocation for Russia's choice of war. It's an example, one of the oldest human

impulses, using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.

It's nothing less than a direct challenge to the rule-based international order

established since the end of World War II. And it threatens to return to decades of war

that ravaged Europe before the international rule-based order was put in place. we can not go back to that. We cannot.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy challenged Soviet tyranny in Europe by declaring all free men,

wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. In 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at Brandenburg

Gate and demanded Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. A generation later, the 46th president

of the United States delivered his own stinging rebuke of Russian barbarism and once again divided the world.

As David Rothkoff writes, between the forces of democracy and those of autocracy,

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