Ukraine, accusations of genocide in Putin: Biden still displaces

Having been the first to accuse Russia of war crimes, after having branded Vladimir Putin as a ‘butcher’ who cannot “remain in power”, Joe Biden now raises the bar again and accuses the “dictator” Putin of genocide. Word that indicates the systematic attempt to eliminate a specific ethnic group, which until now the exponents of the American administration had refrained from pronouncing. And the president’s comment, delivered last night during a speech on the increase in gasoline prices in Iowa, and then reiterated to reporters who asked for clarification, seems to have also displaced the allies, if today Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to be “cautious “with the terms avoiding a” escalation of the words “. “It is certain that war crimes have been committed by the Russian army” said the French president engaged in the electoral campaign for the presidential ballot, stressing that “genocide has a meaning”. Read also According to the definition of the United Nations, they constitute genocide “acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. The term was first used by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 to describe the Jewish Holocaust and was then codified as an international crime by a 1948 international convention, signed by 150 countries, including Russia. No one in either the UN or the US has so far determined that the brutalities committed by the Russians amount to genocide. The United States has a process for declaring cases of genocide, which for example in recent weeks has led the State Department to denounce the repression of the Rohingya in Myanmar as genocide. “Based on what we have seen so far, we have seen atrocities.” Homeland Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said last week. “We have seen war crimes, but we have not seen a level of systematic elimination of Ukrainians that reaches the level of genocide.” Biden, however, did not hesitate to use this word yesterday: “Your family budgets, the possibility of filling up, should not depend on a dictator declaring war and committing genocide on the other side of the world,” he said in the speech in Iowa, then reiterating the use of the word with reporters. “We let the international legal experts decide whether or not it is, but it sure seems to me that it is,” he said. “It is more and more clear that Putin is trying to erase the idea of ​​being Ukrainians – he added -, the evidence accumulates, more and more evidence is arriving of the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine”. It is not the first time that Biden has displaced his most thoughtful advisers with his utterances on the war and Putin. When he accused Putin of being a “war criminal” in mid-March, his administration had not yet completed the assessment of the Russians’ actions. And then during a speech in Warsaw, the president effectively evoked regime change in Moscow – “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” – forcing the White House and members of the administration immediately to clarify that the Regime change is not Washington’s policy.