Stiffening tone, Biden appears to accuse Putin of genocide in Ukraine
DES MOINES, Iowa — US President Joe Biden appeared to accuse Russian leader Vladimir Putin of genocide on Tuesday for the first time, during a speech about gasoline prices.
“Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank — none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide half a world away,” Biden said at an event in Iowa.
The Biden administration has sought to blame sharp rises at US gas stations on Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, during which Russian troops have been accused of committing atrocities against civilians.
Ukraine has been accusing Russia of committing war crimes since even before the discovery of hundreds of civilians reportedly killed in Bucha sparked an outpouring of revulsion. Officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have accused Putin of genocide and compared the Russian onslaught to the Holocaust, though most leaders in the West have shied from using the term genocide.
Biden described Putin as a “war criminal” last week amid the global outrage and called on him to face trial over the alleged atrocity.
But the United States has stopped short of using the term “genocide,” in line with longstanding protocol, because of its strict legal definition and the heavy implication the accusation carries. Experts say recognizing a conflict as genocide could trigger certain obligations under the UN’s Convention on Genocide.
US President Joe Biden announces steps to ease rising consumer prices at POET Bioprocessing in Menlo, Iowa on April 12, 2022. (MANDEL NGAN / AFP)
Biden previously was asked by reporters whether the killings in Bucha amounted to “genocide” and he replied: “No, I think it is a war crime.”
In the face of stiff resistance by Ukrainian forces bolstered by Western weapons, Russian forces have increasingly relied on bombarding cities, flattening many urban areas and leaving thousands of people dead. The war has also driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes — including nearly two-thirds of all children.
Moscow’s retreat from cities and towns around the capital, Kyiv, led to the discovery of large numbers of apparently massacred civilians, prompting widespread condemnation and accusations that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine.
Reports have primarily focused on the northwestern suburbs such as Bucha, where the mayor said 403 bodies have been found. Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk feared the toll would rise as minesweepers comb through the area.
A Ukrainian soldier walks with children passing destroyed cars due to the war against Russia, in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, April 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)
Ukraine’s prosecutor-general’s office said Tuesday that it was also looking into events in the Brovary district, which lies to the northeast.
The prosecutor’s office said the bodies of six civilians had been found with gunshot wounds in a basement in the village of Shevchenkove and that Russian forces were believed to be responsible.
Prosecutors are also investigating allegations that Russian forces fired on a convoy of civilians trying to leave by car from the village of Peremoha in the Brovary district, killing four people, including a 13-year-old boy. In another attack near Bucha, five people were killed, including two children, when a car was fired upon, prosecutors said.
Firefighters try to extinguish a fire after a missile hit a building on the outskirts of Kharkiv on April 12, 2022. (SERGEY BOBOK / AFP)
Putin falsely claimed Tuesday that Ukraine’s accusation that hundreds of civilians were killed by Russian troops in the town of Bucha were “fake.” Associated Press reporters saw dozens of bodies in and around the town, some with hands bound who appeared to have been shot at close range.
In Mariupol, a strategic port city in the Donbas, a Ukrainian regiment defending a steel mill claimed a drone dropped a poisonous substance on the city. It indicated there were no serious injuries. The assertion by the Azov Regiment, a far-right group now part of the Ukrainian military, could not be independently verified.
It came after a Russia-allied separatist official appeared to urge the use of chemical weapons, telling Russian state TV on Monday that separatist forces should seize the plant by first blocking all the exits. “And then we’ll use chemical troops to smoke them out of there,” the official, Eduard Basurin, said. He denied Tuesday that separatist forces had used chemical weapons in Mariupol.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said officials were investigating, and it was possible phosphorus munitions — which cause horrendous burns but are not classed as chemical weapons — had been used in Mariupol.
Much of the city has been razed in weeks of pummeling by Russian troops. The mayor said Monday that the siege has left more than 10,000 civilians dead, their bodies “carpeted through the streets.” Mayor Vadym Boychenko said the death toll in Mariupol alone could surpass 20,000 and gave new details of allegations by Ukrainian officials that Russian forces have brought mobile cremation equipment to dispose of the corpses.
A man and his wife push a cart with food past a school damaged by shelling in Yahidne, near of Dnipro, Ukraine, Tuesday, April 12, 2022. (AP/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, acknowledged the challenges Ukrainian troops face in Mariupol. He said on Twitter that they remain blocked and are having issues with supplies, while Zelenskyy and Ukrainian generals “do everything possible (and impossible) to find a solution and help our guys.”
“For more than 1.5 months our defenders protect the city from (Russian) troops, which are 10+ times larger,” Podolyak said in a tweet. “They’re fighting under the bombs for each meter of the city. They make (Russia) pay an exorbitant price.”
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the use of chemical weapons “would be a callous escalation in this conflict,” while Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said it would be a “wholesale breach of international law.”