Biden accuses Putin of 'genocide', wanting to 'wipe out' Ukrainians
President Joe Biden said Russia's war in Ukraine amounted to "genocide", accusing President Vladimir Putin of trying to "wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian".
"Yes, I called it genocide," he told reporters in Iowa on Tuesday shortly before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington. "It's become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian."
At an earlier event in Menlo, Iowa, addressing spiking energy prices resulting from the war, Biden had implied that he thought Putin was carrying out genocide against Ukraine but offered no details.
Neither he nor his administration announced new consequences for Russia or assistance to Ukraine following Biden's public assessment.
Biden's comments drew praise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had encouraged Western leaders to use the term to describe Russia's invasion of his country.
"True words of a true leader", he tweeted. "Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil. We are grateful for US assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities."
A United Nations treaty defines genocide as actions taken with the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
In the past, Western leaders often avoided formally declaring campaigns targeting civilians as genocide, hesitating to trigger an obligation under international convention requiring countries to intervene once genocide is formally identified.
That obligation was seen as blocking former US President Bill Clinton from declaring Rwandan Hutus' killing of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in 1994 as genocide, for example.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the summary
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