U.S. President Joe Biden for the first time qualified the atrocities of the Russian military in Ukraine as genocide. Previously, the politician avoided this term, calling the events a "war crime," but after seeing the scenes of devastation from the occupants, he changed his rhetoric. CNN writes about it.
"I called it genocide because it's becoming clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to destroy even the idea of being Ukrainian. There's more and more evidence," Biden told reporters in Iowa.
"It's different than it was last week, more and more evidence is emerging. Without exaggeration, what the Russians have done in Ukraine is terrible, and we're going to learn more and more about the destruction," he continued.
Biden noted that whether to recognize the atrocities in Ukraine as genocide will be decided by lawyers at the international level.
The U.S. government rarely labels atrocities using the term genocide. The Chinese campaign against the Uighurs and the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar were previously qualified as such. There are no legal implications after using the term "genocide," but it carries considerable weight as Biden seeks to rally countries on a strategy to isolate and punish the Kremlin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reacted almost immediately to Biden's statement and thanked him for helping the country. He stated that "calling things by their proper names is important to confront evil."
We shall remind you that during the occupation of only the Buchansky community in the Kiev region, the occupiers killed there more than 400 local residents. The Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that they have already found 720 bodies of dead civilians in Kyiv Region after the occupation of the region by Russian terrorists.
