Joe Biden continued his stay in Europe this Saturday, again attacking Vladimir Putin head-on. In Poland, the American president met with Ukrainian refugees and, moved by what he saw, called his Russian counterpart a “butcher” for the crimes committed by the Kremlin in Ukraine.
Later that day, in a speech at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the leader reiterated his attacks. “For the love of God, this man cannot stay in power,” Joe Biden said of the Russian president.
But a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, made it clear shortly after that the US leader 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. »
Speaking directly to Russians, Joe Biden insisted in his speech that it is not the Russian people that he sees as the enemy. “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. »
Close warning in Moscow
Joe Biden 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 NATO territory. »
Previously, President Biden had held talks in Warsaw with two Ukrainian ministers in his first such face-to-face meeting with senior Kyiv officials since the Russian aggression began. Asked about the Russian command’s announcement that it intends to “concentrate the bulk of its efforts on the main objective: the liberation of Donbass”, he said he “wasn’t sure” it meant a real strategy change.
“Sacred Duty”
At the end of the morning, the occupant of the White House 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 Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. 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.
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 him that Article 5 of the NATO treaty, stipulating that an attack on one member country is an attack on all, constituted a “sacred duty” for the United States.