(WASHINGTON) — After weeks of warning of “severe” sanctions if Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joe Biden was set to deliver remarks from the White House Thursday in what’s unfolding as a defining moment in his presidency as President Vladimir Putin continued a large-scale attack.

Expected to announce additional sanctions on Russia, Biden will lay out “further consequences the United States and our Allies and partners will impose on Russia for its unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine,” according to a White House official.

But it’s still unclear how much further those sanctions will go — and whether they would make any difference in what Putin claimed overnight would be a “special military operation” in eastern Ukraine, but is proving to be much more widespread.

“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside, if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” Putin warned the world.

While it was also still unclear just how far Putin would go beyond eastern Ukraine, Russian forces attacked near the capital city Kyiv — raising new fears he would try to topple Ukraine’s government.

Will Biden sanction Putin personally?

The Biden administration has threatened further sanctions on major Russian financial institutions and banks, to take steps to restrict Russian access to technology, to cut Russia off from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) — which would hinder Russia’s participation in global markets, and to directly sanction Putin’s inner circle — or the Russian president himself.

Biden told reporters late last month that he would consider personally sanctioning Putin if Russia invaded Ukraine — a day after 8,500 American forces were put on “heightened alert” in the region — but those efforts did not appear to deter the Russian leader, nor did economic sanctions imposed this week by the U.S. and European allies, including halting the certification of Nord Stream 2, a major natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany.

The Biden administration has already begun to roll out a “first tranche” of sanctions, related to Russian banks, oligarchs and the natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, as some lawmakers have criticized Biden of not going far enough on sanctions, which haven’t resulted in Russia reversing course.

As of Thursday morning, Russian forces had advanced from three directions — from the south heading north, from Belarus heading south to Kyiv and from northeast of Ukraine heading to the south — as Ukrainian woke up to a nation at war.

US military assessment, diplomatic moves

U.S. intelligence believes these three axes were “designed to take key population centers,” a senior defense official said Thursday.

The White House has said the sanctions will be “united and decisive,” but it remains to be seen how the West can punish Putin, who seems intent on moving ahead with his plans, despite weeks of attempted diplomacy from the international community and a set of sanctions already imposed.

With the U.S. condemning what’s it calling an “unprovoked and unjustified” attack on Ukraine, Biden met with his National Security Council in the Situation Room early Thursday ahead of a virtual video call with G-7 leaders to discuss a united response to the Russian attack.

Earlier this morning, President Biden convened a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room to discuss the unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/QcZ5N2fcAa

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 24, 2022

Notably, Russia was a part of the G-7 until its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — where it is now closing in further on Ukrainian borders.

Biden was at the White House overnight as the attack unfolded.

Within minutes, Biden was on the phone with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had reached out to him after receiving “silence,” he said, on a phone call to Putin. Russia has two tactical goals in Ukraine, according to Zelenskyy’s office: seizing territory and toppling Ukrainian leadership.

Consequences — for Americans

After their call, Biden released a statement saying that Putin “has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering.”

“The prayers of the world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces,” Biden said.

The American president has acknowledged that there will be “consequences at home” — particularly at the gas pump and in energy prices — as a result of the Russian invasion and subsequent sanctions but has vowed to mitigate those costs.

However, ahead of his Thursday remarks, U.S. crude oil prices topped $100 a barrel, sending gasoline prices to an average of $3.54 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. At least three states had average gas prices of $4 or higher. Meanwhile, U.S. stock and dow futures also plunged.

Still, Biden has reminded Americans that the U.S. has a responsibility to defend its NATO allies — and democracy around the world.

“Because this is about more than just Russia and Ukraine,” he said in remarks last week. “It’s about standing for what we believe in, for the future that we want for our world, for liberty, for liberty, the right of countless countries to choose their own destiny. And the right of people to determine their own futures — or the principle that a country can’t change its neighbor’s borders by force.”

ABC News’ Luis Martinez and Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The White House has begun a sweeping overhaul of its COVID strategy that will signal the nation is moving past crisis mode and into a more manageable phase in the pandemic, ABC News has learned.

The new strategy was expected to acknowledge that the virus — which has killed at least 936,162 Americans in the past two years — is less of an urgent threat to most Americans because of widespread access to vaccines, booster shots, and testing, as well as increasing availability of therapeutics.

At the same time, the White House on Wednesday began working behind the scenes with some of the nation’s most prominent pandemic experts to game out the various paths the virus could take to ensure the government is prepared.

In a private online meeting, Jeff Zients, the White House coordinator on the federal COVID response, led the group in discussing potential trajectories in the pandemic — from the best case scenario that the virus evolves into a mild flu-like illness, to the worst case that an aggressive new variant could evade effectiveness of the vaccine.

The overall consensus was that COVID has fundamentally altered U.S. public health.

“There’s no scenario where we say, ‘oh my gosh, let’s go back to normal,'” said one person involved in the effort.

The White House described Wednesday’s online meeting as part of a series of outreach efforts with governors and business leaders to discuss the pandemic. Included in Wednesday’s discussion were several former advisers to President Joe Biden during his transition after the election, but who had more recently called on the administration to shift gears and tackle COVID as part of the nation’s “new normal.”

Among those in attendance included Zients; David Kessler, Biden’s chief scientific adviser; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist with the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Centers for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota; Dr. Luciana Borio, a former senior official at the National Security Council and former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration now with the Council on Foreign Relations; and David Michaels, an epidemiologist and former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration now with George Washington University’s School of Public Health.

The meeting was confirmed by several people familiar with the effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on private White House meetings. Among the issues discussed were what resources the U.S. might need to ensure access to life-saving therapeutics and shoring up any vulnerabilities in the supply chain.

“We’ve seen things come down before only to be surprised,” one person said, describing the meetings as helping the administration to prepare for next steps.

Timing of the White House announcement of its updated COVID strategy was unclear as the Ukraine crisis escalated Thursday with Russia’s invasion. Biden had been expected to address aspects of the new COVID approach in his State of the Union address on March 1.

In a separate effort, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing new guidance intended to help local officials decide when it’s safe to pull back on restrictions, such as indoor masking mandates. Those updated recommendations, expected within the week, were expected to emphasize local hospital capacity and focus less on case counts when measuring a community’s ability to withstand increased COVID transmission.

“We must consider hospital capacity as an additional important barometer. Our hospitals need to be able to take care of people with heart attacks and strokes,” Walensky told reporters last week.

The shift comes as Biden and Democratic governors are under increasing pressure by voters fed up with restrictions due to the virus. Several states have moved preemptively to lift restrictions, even as the CDC continues to recommend indoor masking, particularly in schools.

According to a recent Gallup poll, more Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of the virus — 52% — than those who approve. In recent weeks, Democratic strategists have advised party officials to shift their focus away from COVID and focus on curbing inflation instead.

Zients hinted at the upcoming shift in federal COVID strategy at a press briefing last week.

“We’re moving toward a time when COVID isn’t a crisis but is something we can protect against and treat,” Zients told reporters on Feb. 16.

Biden officials say the administration is still keenly aware of the balancing act involved. COVID-related hospitalizations are now nearing the lowest level since before the omicron surge — a positive sign that the nation has turned a corner in the two-year pandemic.

At the same time, concerns of another variant remain, as well as the lack of a vaccine available to children ages 4 and under. Data on a Pfizer pediatric vaccine for the population isn’t expected until April. Meanwhile, hospitalization rates for that age group are at its highest throughout the pandemic.

“We definitely are heading into a new phase of the pandemic,” said Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation who has previously advised Biden on COVID.

But, “I think we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that it was over prematurely in the past, and it’s just hurt us,” she added.

ABC News Sony Salzman, Cheyenne Haslett, Sasha Pezenik and Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.

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