While visiting Iowa on a rural infrastructure tour, U.S. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “dictator” while blaming him for spiking fuel prices.
During the same speech in Menlo, Iowa on April 12, he accused the Kremlin leader of committing acts of “genocide half a world away” in Ukraine where his military is waging a devastating war, the worst on the European continent since World War II.
It was the first time Biden described the human horrors that were discovered in the nearby suburbs and villages of Kyiv and elsewhere genocide after invading Russian troops retreated around April 1 after being routed by Ukrainian forces.
The barbaric scenes came in the wake of Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine that started as a multi-pronged assault on Feb. 24.
CNN reported that regarding rising fuel prices linked to Russia as a major exporter of oil and gas, Biden said, “your family budget, your ability to fill up your [gas] tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away,” CNN reported.
Afterward, before boarding Air Force One, Biden told journalists the uncovered atrocities are “genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukraine,” Reuters reported.
He added that lawyers should “decide internationally” if the actions qualify as genocide, “but it sure seems that way to me.”
The U.S. defines genocide as “an act against members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” NBC News said.
The worst Russian atrocities so far have been discovered in the northwestern Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where more than 400 bodies have been exhumed, many with gunshots wounds to the head. Some victims had signs of sexual violence.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has characterized the killings there as genocide.
