On Easter Sunday, Biden boarded Air Force Two, bound for Kiev, the beleaguered Ukrainian capital. In the aftermath, Russian forces swept into Crimea, and Vladimir Putin christened it Russian soil. Yanukovych fled, leaving his subjects to pry open his mansion and find the fruits of his kleptocracy: pet peacocks, a fleet of antique cars, a private restaurant in the shape of a pirate ship. But on February 20th government snipers opened fire on protesters, killing at least eighty-eight people in forty-eight hours. “I said, ‘You look like a thug!’ I said, ‘You’re so damn big.’ ” As the crisis escalated, Biden spoke with Yanukovych by phone nine times, urging him to reconcile with the demonstrators. “He was gregarious,” Biden told me earlier this year. Biden had known Yanukovych since 2009 and struck up a towel-snapping rapport. Last November, Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych scrapped an agreement with the European Union, triggering protests that plunged the country into crisis. John Marttila, one of Biden’s political advisers, told me, “Joe and Barack were having lunch, and Obama said to Biden, ‘You and I are becoming good friends! I find that very surprising.’ And Joe says, ‘ You’re fucking surprised!’ ” The trials facing the President and the Vice-President, who are separated by nineteen years and a canyon in style, have brought them closer than many expected-not least of all themselves. Last year, Biden said that the President “sends me to places that he doesn’t want to go.”Īfter more than five years in the White House, Obama leans less visibly on Biden for foreign-policy advice than he once did, but Biden remains so closely identified with the Administration’s handling of the most vexing national-security problems that, when militants seized large parts of Iraq, in June, Mitt Romney told a mostly Republican audience that the “Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton foreign policy” was to blame. A former chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he has been visiting Eastern Europe since the nineteen-seventies, and he was tapped to be Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 partly to compensate for the candidate’s inexperience abroad. Of all the foreign crises confronting the White House, none has consumed more of Biden’s time and attention in recent months than the wars in Ukraine and Iraq. When Biden reached the dais at a convention center in Detroit, he said that the plane “apparently has been shot down.” He added, “Not an accident. Details were sketchy, but intelligence suggested that the Boeing 777-200, carrying two hundred and ninety-eight people, had been hit by a surface-to-air missile. Shortly before he landed, an aide told him that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in eastern Ukraine, an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists. At noon on Thursday, July 17th, Vice-President Joe Biden was on his way to Detroit for a day of light political fare: a fund-raiser, a community-college visit, a speech to progressive groups.

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