(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.
Posted at 11:25 a.m.
Updated at 2:25 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.
Speaking directly to the Russians, he insisted that it is not the Russian people that 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”.
“This war is already a strategic failure for Russia”, added Mr. Biden, who, applauded by some thousand people who attended his speech in front of the royal castle in Warsaw, immediately left for the airport, to return to Washington in the night.
“He’s a butcher”
The US president earlier on Saturday called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a “butcher” during a meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw.
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.