On Tuesday, the putative US president Joe Biden accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of overseeing a program of genocide in Ukraine.
President Biden on Tuesday for the first time accused Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of perpetrating genocide on the Ukrainian people, but emphasized that was his personal view, not a legal determination.
The remark initially came offhandedly in a speech at a bioethanol plant in Iowa, in which Mr. Biden was announcing measures to counteract rising gas prices. About halfway through the speech, he made reference to Mr. Putin and the war’s economic impact on Americans.
“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,” Mr. Biden said. It was a marked escalation from statements earlier this month, when he said Russian atrocities in the suburbs near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, amounted to war crimes, but did not rise to the level of genocide.
On the tarmac later on Tuesday afternoon as he left Iowa, the president reaffirmed his characterization.
“Yes, I called it genocide. It has become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be Ukrainian,” he said.
“We’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies,” he added, “but it sure seems that way to me.”
In international law, genocide is not just a slur; it has a specific definition.
Article II In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
As the war rages in Ukraine, every day brings about new evidence of Russian atrocities against unarmed Ukrainian civilians (The Ukrainian Army Liberates Territory From Russian Invaders and Discovers Murdered Civilians, Russian Torture Chamber Discovered in Liberated Ukraine Town as the Russian Army Continues to Do What It Is Good at Doing, Russia Denies Its Army Committed War Crimes in Ukraine in the Most Russian Way Possible). The evidence is not only from the Ukrainian government, as more and more towns are liberated from the Russian reign of terror, but from major news media (the New York Times and Economist have done stellar work in that regard).
The evidence is so blatant that even the Russians agree that thousands of civilians have been killed. They just claim the killings are part of a Ukrainian “false flag” operation.
Other troubling aspects of the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine are coming to light. For example, possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to Russia.
There is growing evidence that deported Ukrainian children are taken from their parents and placed in Russian homes; the Russian Duma is changing Russian adoption law to facilitate that process.
Indeed, some of the public pronouncements by Putin and his inner circle read like they could have come from the Wannsee Conference (Kremlin Newspaper and a Putin Confidant Endorse Genocide as Russia’s Final Solution to the Ukraine Problem).
Had Biden made the statement in any form other than lying about the effect the Ukraine war has had on US gas and food prices and inflation, it could have been significant. Unfortunately, yet again, Biden has imagined himself to be a “tough hombre” in some mental drama of his own making. In the process, he created a problem within the EU.
Macron is a cuck and weenie, but he’s also the president of France (so that goes without saying), and at a time when the EU and NATO need to present a unified front, Biden’s comment was not helpful. Moreover, it was definitely not helpful in the context of managing a negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war, should that even be possible.
Another question is what this means for the fate of the Iran nuclear deal? Biden has followed Obama’s diplomatic strategy of using Russia’s “good offices” with Iran to negotiate on our behalf. It isn’t easy to see how you can rationalize collaborating with a genocidaire.
In short, Biden took the very real probability that the genocidal strategy laid out for Ukraine in various articles and statements in the Russian press was in its first stages and turned that looming tragedy into a way to score a few minor political points.