WASHINGTON — President Biden vowed on Tuesday to make President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “pay a price” for invading Ukraine, seeking to rally the world as Moscow’s forces rained down missiles on Ukrainian cities and prepared to lay siege to the capital of Kyiv.
Appearing before a joint session of Congress at a fraught moment in modern history, Mr. Biden called for a united resistance to defend the international order endangered by Russian aggression and warned the oligarchs who bolster Mr. Putin’s regime that he would seize their luxury yachts and private jets.
“Six days ago, Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to shake the very foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways,” Mr. Biden said. “But he badly miscalculated. He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met with a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined. He met the Ukrainian people.”
Hailing the heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, Mr. Biden introduced Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, who joined Jill Biden in the first lady’s box holding a small blue-and-white Ukrainian flag. In a show of bipartisan solidarity, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, some of them wearing blue and yellow and many of them waving Ukrainian flags, leapt to their feet in an ovation to her and her country.
While the guns of Europe overshadowed the political disputes at home that have weighed down his presidency, Mr. Biden sought to use his first formal State of the Union address to persuade glum Americans that the country is making impressive progress containing the coronavirus pandemic and rebuilding the economy.
He made a fresh pitch for the social spending programs that have been logjammed in Congress, including expanded child care, elder care, prekindergarten education, climate change initiatives and prescription-drug price cuts, without explaining how he planned to overcome the opposition. And he vowed to take action to curb inflation, saying “my top priority is getting prices under control.”
Two years after the pandemic transformed American life, Mr. Biden declared that “we’ve reached a new moment in the fight against Covid-19,” and he generated bipartisan applause by calling for schools to remain open. “Our kids need to be in school,” he said. Yet he warned against complacency and called on lawmakers who have demonstrated unity over Ukraine to put aside their differences at home.
“Let’s use this moment to reset,” he said in the hourlong speech. “So stop looking at Covid as a partisan dividing line. See it for what it is: a God-awful disease. Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies. Let’s start seeing each other for who we are: fellow Americans.”
But the discord of today’s politics erupted in the chamber in ways that would have once been unthinkable. When Mr. Biden talked about immigration reform, Representative Lauren Boebert, a far-right Republican from Colorado given to angry spectacle and conspiracies, tried to start a “build the wall” chant but was joined only by a like-minded colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.
For more background and context, students might watch this Times video of President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, from January 2016, and this video of Mr. Trump’s final State of the Union address, in February 2020. And you can follow along via this page for all Times coverage on the State of the Union address.
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