Ukraine: Vladimir Putin is “a butcher” for Joe Biden – The HuffPost

WAR IN UKRAINE – This is a qualifier that should make a lot of noise. This Saturday, March 26, from Poland where he is currently visiting on the sidelines of the invasion of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a “butcher” during a meeting with Ukrainian refugees. in Warsaw. Asked about “what he thought of Vladimir Poutine, considering what he inflicts on these people”, Joe Biden replied in one sentence: “He is a butcher”. And this while the meeting was broadcast live by several television channels from the National Stadium in Warsaw. On Wednesday March 16, the American president had already taken a first step by responding to an American journalist at the White House. He then called Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”, without giving further details. “Unacceptable and unforgivable” remarks, then replied the Kremlin. Moscow also responded immediately after the qualifier used by Joe Biden this Saturday: “These new insults further reduce the window of opportunity for relations between Russia and the United States”, retorted spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, quoted by the Tass agency. Visibly moved by his meeting with the refugees – including two people who said they came from Mariupol – Joe Biden hugged two young refugee women. Summarizing his impressions after the visit to the welcome center set up at the stadium, he called the young children he had just seen “magnificent” and said that they had asked him to pray “for their father, grandfather and brother.” Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters In front of Ukrainian refugees, in Poland, Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a “butcher”.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. “Not sure” of Moscow’s change in strategyDuring this outing in Warsaw, Joe Biden also said that he “wasn’t sure” that Russia’s announcement to focus its offensive on Donbass meant a change in its strategy in Ukraine. Asked 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.Joe Biden, whose first meeting with senior Ukrainian officials since the beginning of the war on February 24, engaged in an informal conversation with the head of diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov, the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The talks focused on “the unwavering commitment of the United States to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price. The President of the United States, who later met with Polish President Andrzej Duda, also underlined Washington’s “sacred commitment” to the principle of the collective defense of NATO member countries. See also on HuffPost: These sentences of Zemmour on Putin which turn against him with the war in Ukraine