Washington. President Biden on Wednesday called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” noting that the president used the term for the first time to characterize his Russian counterpart since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine nearly three weeks ago.
Mr. Biden made the comment to a group of reporters at the White House after an event re-approving the Violence Against Women Act. When asked if Putin was a “war criminal”, the president initially said “no” and left, but then returned to the press and, when the question was repeated, said he considered the Russian leader a war criminal.
“Oh, I think he’s a war criminal,” the president replied without going into details.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, among other acts of Russian aggression in Ukraine, called the explosion of a maternity hospital.
“We have all seen the barbaric, horrific actions of a foreign dictator in a country that threatens and takes the lives of civilians, hitting hospitals, pregnant women, journalists and others,” she said. “I think he was answering a direct question.”
President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. AP
Psaki said the State Department was conducting a legal review of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and whether they constituted war crimes.
Putin’s spokesman reacted angrily to Mr. Biden’s comments, according to TASS, the Russian state news agency. “We consider unacceptable and unforgivable such rhetoric of the head of state, whose bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” said Dmitry Peskov.
Mr. Biden’s comment came as Russia continued to shell Ukraine’s civilian population, with increasing loss of life and suffering. On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously approved a resolution condemning the violence in Ukraine and calling for an investigation into war crimes against Putin and members of his regime.
The International Court of Justice ordered Russia to end the invasion and launched an investigation into the war. The UN Human Rights Office has registered about 600 civilian casualties, although the number of casualties is expected to be much higher. More than 2,000 people were killed in the port city of Mariupol alone, according to Ukrainian authorities. The UN estimates that 3 million people have fled Ukraine because of the war with Russia, and about 2 million more have become internally displaced. The UN has said Ukraine’s refugee crisis is the fastest growing in Europe since World War II.
On Wednesday, the US embassy in Ukraine said Russian troops shot and killed 10 people who were queuing for bread in Chernihiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine that was hit by Russian artillery fire.
“Such horrendous attacks must stop. We are considering all available options to ensure accountability for any atrocities in Ukraine,” the embassy said on Twitter.
Local officials in Ukraine and Dmytro Kuleba, the country’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday that Russian troops had targeted a theater in Mariupol where “hundreds” of civilians were hiding.
“The Russians couldn’t have been unaware that this was a civilian shelter,” Kuleba said. tweetedalong with a photograph purporting to show the theater under siege.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Biden announced new $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, including combat drones. But the new security assistance does not include fighter jets or establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky requested in a virtual address to Congress Wednesday morning.
“Russia has turned the Ukrainian skies into a source of death for thousands of people,” Zelenskiy said in a speech during which he showed deputies a visual video showing the extent of Russian death and destruction in Ukraine.
Mr. Biden, who watched the speech from the White House residence, called Zelensky’s speech “passionate.”
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