(Warsaw) US President Joe Biden on Saturday called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a “butcher” during a meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw.
Posted at 11:25 a.m.
Updated at 11:57 a.m.
Asked about “what he thought of Vladimir Putin, given what he inflicts on these people”, Mr. Biden replied with one sentence: “He is a butcher”, while the meeting was transmitted in live by several TV channels from the National Stadium in Warsaw.
This is not the first time that the American president has used harsh words with regard to Vladimir Putin, considered to be mainly responsible for the Russian invasion in Ukraine which has already caused thousands of deaths. In recent days he has twice called him a “war criminal”.
Visibly moved by his meeting with the refugees — including two people who said they were from Mariupol, the port in southeastern Ukraine largely destroyed by Russian bombing — Mr. Biden hugged two young refugee women.
Summarizing his impressions after the visit to the welcome center at the stadium, he described the young children he had just seen as “beautiful” and reported that they had asked him to pray “for their father, grandfather and brother “.
He also said he “wasn’t sure” that Russia’s announcement to focus its offensive on Donbass meant a change in its strategy in Ukraine.
Questioned by a journalist on this point, he replied briefly: “I am not sure that they (the Russians) have done it”, while the Russian command declared on Friday that it wanted to “concentrate the bulk of the efforts on the main objective: the liberation of Donbass”, contrasting with the Kremlin’s stated intention to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the whole of Ukraine.
He stressed that he “knows well what it is to have someone close in a war zone”, in an allusion to his son Beau Biden, who died in 2015 of cancer, who had fought in Iraq.