(Warsaw) US President Joe Biden said Saturday in Warsaw that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin should not stay in power after launching the invasion of Ukraine, a statement quickly qualified by the White House.
Posted at 11:25 a.m.
Updated at 3:33 p.m.
“For the love of God, this man cannot stay in power,” said Mr. Biden, during a speech at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, with a particularly harsh tone towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier in the day, he called the Russian leader a “butcher”.
But a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, clarified shortly after that the US president had not called for “regime change” in Moscow.
“What the president meant was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or over the region. He was not talking about Putin’s power in Russia, nor about regime change,” the official said.
Speaking directly to Russians, Mr Biden insisted that it is not the Russian people he sees as the enemy.
“Let me say this if you are able to hear me – you, the Russian people, are not our enemy,” he said.
PHOTO EVELYN HOCKSTEIN, REUTERS
Joe Biden
“I refuse to believe that you welcome the murder of innocent children and grandparents or that you accept that hospitals, schools, maternities be pounded by Russian missiles and bombs. »
“This war is not worthy of you, Russian people. Putin can and must put an end to this war”, hammered again the American president.
But at the same time he felt that the conflict was not going to end soon.
The battle “between democracy and autocracy” will “not be won in days or months. We must arm ourselves for a long fight ahead of us”, he warned, before assuring the Ukrainians: “We are on your side”.
He also reaffirmed that the United States did not want to come into conflict with the Russian forces that invaded Ukraine, but he issued a strong warning to Moscow: “Don’t even think about advancing an inch in of NATO”.
” Butcher ”
Previously, President Biden spoke in Warsaw with two Ukrainian ministers in his first such face-to-face meeting with senior Kyiv officials since the Russian aggression began.
He also met Ukrainian refugees hosted in Poland and, moved by what he saw, called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “butcher”.
Asked about the Russian command’s announcement that it intends to “focus most of its efforts on the main objective: the liberation of Donbass”, the US president said he “wasn’t sure” it meant a real change of strategy.
So far, the Kremlin has shown its will to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the whole of Ukraine, attacking the country in several places and seeking to occupy its capital Kyiv.
At the end of the morning, Mr. Biden spoke at his hotel with the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba and the Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov, on the sidelines of their meeting with the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Secretary at the Lloyd Austin Defense.
The four ministers discussed in particular “the unwavering commitment of the United States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.
Missile Fragment
Mr. Kouleba then said that he had given Mr. Biden a fragment of the Russian missile which had struck the Yavoriv base, near the Polish border.
On the second day of his official visit to Poland, Mr. Biden also met his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda. He assured her that Article 5 of the NATO treaty, stipulating that an attack on one member country is an attack on all, was a “sacred duty” for the United States.