US President Joe Biden violently attacked his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, calling him a “butcher” and saying he could “not stay in power” after his invasion of Ukraine, a statement immediately tempered by the White House.
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Coming to show his support for Poland, a country on the eastern flank of the Atlantic Alliance and bordering Ukraine, Mr. Biden on Saturday described the war in this country as a “strategic failure for Russia”, and warned authorities in Moscow, enjoining them not to “even [penser] to advance one centimeter into NATO territory”.
Before his charge against the master of the Kremlin at the start of the evening, the American president had called Mr. Putin a “butcher” for the crimes committed according to him by the Russian army in Ukraine.
Calling on Mr. Biden to remain “thoughtful” in his remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reacted to this first attack by judging that “every time, personal insults of this kind reduce the field of possibilities for our bilateral relationship with the current US government.
The host of the White House drove the point home during a speech in front of a thousand people at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, directly challenging the “Russian people”.
“What the President Meant to Say”
Assuring not to consider him an “enemy”, but judging that the war in Ukraine, with its atrocities, was not “worthy” of him, Mr. Biden added: “This man cannot remain in power”.
“What the President meant was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” the White House had to qualify: “He was not talking about Putin’s power in Russia, nor a change of regime”.
Mr Biden also expressed doubts about Russia’s intentions in Ukraine.
A little over a month after the outbreak of the war, the Russian command surprised everyone by announcing on Friday “to concentrate the bulk of the efforts on the main objective: the liberation” of the Donbass mining basin, contrasting with the will displayed by Moscow so far to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine” as a whole and not just in this eastern region where there are two pro-Russian separatist “republics”.
But “I am not sure” that the intentions of the Russians have changed, judged Mr. Biden in the Polish capital.
Shortly after, the Ukrainian authorities announced a series of Russian strikes on fuel depots, which left five injured in Lviv, a large city in western Ukraine relatively spared from the fighting for the moment.
In Warsaw, Mr. Biden met with the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba and the Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov, during a meeting in which their American counterparts Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin also took part.
“The United States assured us that they had no objection to the transfer of the planes,” said Dmytro Kouleba, after his meeting with Joe Biden.
On March 8, visibly taking the United States by surprise, Poland announced that it was “ready to move without delay and free of charge all its Mig-29 planes to the Ramstein base (in Germany) and to make them available to the government. of the United States”, to be handed over to Ukraine.
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called in his last video on Saturday evening for the supply of more weapons.
“We need more weaponry. We must not only protect Ukraine but also the other countries of Eastern Europe, under the threat of a Russian invasion. We made that clear in our talks with our American counterparts in Poland,” he said.
“What is NATO doing? Is it led by Russia? What are they waiting for?” he criticized.
“Sacred Commitment”
Mr. Biden, who also met Polish President Andrzej Duda, underlined Washington’s “sacred commitment” to the principle of the collective defense of NATO member countries.
On the military front, the Ukrainian army ensures, in the last bulletin of its staff published Sunday at dawn, that in the Donbass, in the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, “seven enemy attacks have been repelled” and eight Russian tanks destroyed.
The Russian ministry also claimed that Kalibr-type rockets destroyed an arms and ammunition depot in the Zhytomyr region, west of kyiv, on March 25. A fuel depot was also hit near the port city of Mykolaiv (south), according to the same source.
It is very difficult to independently verify what is happening in the theater of operations.
Ministerial reappearance
At the same time, kyiv announced the death of a seventh senior Russian military official in Ukraine. Russia has so far confirmed the deaths of two top brass, including General Andrei Sukhovetsky, deputy commander of the 41st Army after serving in Syria in 2018-19.
Also according to Western officials, another general, Vladislav Yerchov, was removed from his post by the Kremlin because of the heavy losses suffered by Russian troops.
According to footage released in Russia on Saturday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made his first public appearance in two weeks. His absence had fed questions that the Kremlin had tried to sweep away.
Around kyiv, whose mayor has given up on decreeing a new curfew, the fighting continues.
“Enemy sabotage groups are still trying to enter the capital,” according to the Ukrainian General Staff in its latest bulletin. An anti-aircraft alert was triggered on kyiv, and in several other cities in the night from Saturday to Sunday, and the inhabitants called on to take shelter.
“Nowhere to go”
In Kharkiv, the second city of Ukraine, the inhabitants seem to have resigned themselves to the incessant bombardments.
“I am from Kharkiv, I have nowhere to go. So what’s the point of leaving?” replies wearily Anna Kolinichienko, in her fifties, an old Labrador pulling at the end of her leash.
According to Ukrainian regional authorities, the Russian army took control of the town of Slavutitch, where the personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant reside, briefly arresting the mayor and sparking pro-Ukrainian demonstrations.
“There has been no employee rotation for nearly a week,” since March 20 at the Chernobyl site, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement.
The IAEA is concerned about the ability of employees who manage day-to-day operations at the radioactive waste site to return home to rest.
About 120 km northeast of kyiv, the city of Cherniguiv is surrounded by Russian forces and it is impossible to evacuate civilians and wounded on a massive scale, announced its mayor, Vladislav Atrochenko.
In the Cherniguiv region, the Russian army “is forcibly distributing its so-called humanitarian aid for propaganda purposes in the Russian media”, says the Ukrainian army.
But Ukrainian forces have regained control of the northeastern town of Trostianets, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.
In the besieged city of Mariupol (south), a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, more than 2,000 civilians were killed, according to the municipality. Some 100,000 of its inhabitants are still stuck there and lack everything, according to President Zelensky.
British sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine could be lifted if Moscow agrees to a full ceasefire and withdraws its troops, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said on Saturday.
These statements echo those of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicating that the sanctions against Russia “were not designed to be permanent” and that they could disappear if Moscow changed its attitude.