Biden slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin's "premeditated and unprovoked" war with Ukraine, saying Putin had "sought to shake the foundations of the free world thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways" and "thought the West and NATO wouldn't respond," but had "badly miscalculated."
"He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over," Biden said to a joint session of Congress, who were sitting alongside most of the active U.S. Supreme Court justices, cabinet officials and a number of invited guests, including Ukraine's Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova. "Instead he met a wall of strength he never imagined. He met the Ukrainian people."
Biden, while reiterating that U.S. troops have not and will not be sent to fight Russian forces in Ukraine, touted the more than $1 billion in direct military assistance recently given by the U.S. to Ukraine, as well as efforts by the U.S., NATO and other allies over roughly the past week to implement steadily escalating measures targeted at Russia.
Those efforts include sanctions against Russian banks, companies, politicians and oligarchs, export controls for sensitive technologies such as semiconductors, and cutting off some banks from the SWIFT interbank transfer system.
"Throughout our history, we've learned this lesson — when dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos," Biden said. "They keep moving. And, the costs and threats to America and the world keep rising."
Adding to the "pain" inflicted on Russia so far, the president said that the U.S. will also close its airspace to Russian airlines, joining similar recent actions by Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom.
And in line with those sanctions, Biden announced the formation of a new U.S. Department of Justice task force that he said will, alongside similar European counterparts, "go after the crimes" of those Russian oligarchs and "find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets."
"We are coming for your ill-begotten gains," he said.
After excoriating the Russian invasion, which he said will in time "have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger," Biden then turned to the domestic issues that usually dominate State of the Union speeches, such as calling for lawmakers to support a range of proposed and pending legislation, including gun control laws, voting rights laws and legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
That included urging Congress to pass comprehensive legislation to ensure military service members exposed to toxic chemicals in Iraq and Afghanistan "finally get the benefits and comprehensive health care they deserve."
Biden brought up examples of veterans exposed to fumes from open-air burn pits used during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to dispose of waste, who suffered symptoms such as headaches, numbness, dizziness and, in some cases, "a cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin."
"I know," he said. "One of those soldiers was my son, Maj. Beau Biden. I don't know for sure if the burn pit he lived near in Iraq ... was the cause of his brain cancer, or the disease of so many other troops. But I am committed to finding out everything we can."
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in a related move had announced earlier on Tuesday that it would add nine rare cancers of the respiratory system to its list of presumptively service-related disabilities, while the House of Representatives also kicked off the debate process on H.R. 3967, the Honoring Our PACT Act.
That legislation would establish an even broader presumption of a service-related connection for illnesses linked to burn pit exposure, among other provisions, but faces strong Republican opposition.
Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., the ranking Republican on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said on the House floor Tuesday that the bill's process for designating certain conditions for coverage was not scientifically based and would "create a fundamental unfairness between veterans with similar service and exposure histories."
The estimated cost of the bill, more than $300 billion, was also untenable, and it could "flood VA with so many new mandates that the veterans already receiving care and benefits wait longer ... [which] could spell disaster for them," said Bost, who proposed passing the more limited Health Care for Burn Pit Veterans Act instead, which recently passed the Senate with bipartisan support.
--Editing by Jay Jackson Jr.
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