Biden’s anniversary remarks, delivered to a crowd of 30,000 at Warsaw Royal Castle Gardens, underscored the importance of freedom to the Ukraine war, contending there is “no sweeter word” and “no higher aspiration.”

“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedoms today, tomorrow, and forever,” Biden said, similarly to former President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. “That’s what’s at stake here: freedom.”

Biden’s 20-minute, almost celebratory address has been compared to Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s darker two-hour annual state of the nation remarks delivered only hours earlier. Biden also used the platform to undermine Putin’s claims about the war and respond to his decision to withdraw Russia from the New START nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

“The United States and the nations of Europe do not seek to control or destroy Russia,” Biden said. “The West was not plotting to attack Russia, as Putin said today… This war was never a necessity — it’s a tragedy.”

But as Biden’s pro-Ukraine alliance braces for a possible spring offensive from Russia and increased opposition from congressional Republicans to continued funding of the war, the president is receiving criticism at home for his response to the Chinese spy balloon, the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, and his intention to seek reelection, among others.

During a rare appearance on Fox News as the 2024 Republican presidential primary starts in earnest, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), for one, ripped Biden for “neglecting” problems “accumulating here in our own country” with the trip, amplifying comments from East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway.

“That was the biggest slap in the face that tells you right now, he doesn’t care about us,” Conaway told Fox News of Biden. “He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning in one of the briefings that he was in the Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there, not to us, and I’m furious.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) additionally accused Biden of choosing Ukraine over the United States and described it as “incredibly insulting,” particularly on Presidents Day.

“Impeach Biden or give us a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We don’t pay taxes to fund foreign country’s wars who aren’t even NATO ally’s.”

But as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and other GOP lawmakers in Kyiv one day after he hosted Biden in the capital, the Republican National Committee, instead, scrutinized the president over the southern border and the East Palestine train derailment. The Republican Party’s political operation had spent the previous two weeks calling on Biden to speak publicly about the Chinese spy balloon, which he ordered to be shot down off of South Carolina’s coast eight days after it first entered U.S. airspace.

“Projecting strength in the foreign policy domain rarely hurts presidents,” especially as polls capture Democratic concerns about Biden running again, according to Northeastern University’s political science chairman, Costas Panagopoulos. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, for instance, found this month that 37% of Democrats would prefer the president not to serve another term, a decrease from 52% before last year’s midterm elections.

“Voters have a tendency to ‘rally ’round the flag’ and boost short-term support for presidents during war or international crises, like Ukraine,” Panagopoulos told the Washington Examiner.

The Ukraine war is probably the most important event to transpire so far during Biden’s presidency, according to Rutgers University history, journalism, and media studies professor David Greenberg.

“He is someone who, in his late Senate career and as vice president, came to be deeply concerned about and involved in international affairs, and he is a classic [former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt]-style liberal internationalist who believes deeply in upholding the post-[World War II] liberal international order,” the Republic of Spin author said. “So I don’t think things like the East Palestine train derailment crossed his or anyone else’s mind in planning this trip. Even the Chinese spy balloon is far less significant.”

For Democratic strategist Tom Cochran, an alumnus of former President Barack Obama’s State Department who is now a partner at public affairs firm 720 Strategies, “the sad reality of the job description” is that a president’s attention has to be “on all things at all times.”

“So a trip to Ukraine, including planes, trains, and automobiles, is a pretty good projection of strength, not to mention a real finger in Putin’s eye,” he said.

Republican strategist Cesar Conda, a former chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and founding partner of consulting firm Navigators Global, repeated Biden’s “botched and incompetent” drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan “projected American weakness abroad.”

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“But I have to admit Biden going to Kyiv was a courageous move,” he said. “The scene of the president of the United States walking with Zelensky as air raid sirens were blaring was a welcome show of American strength.”