“I think he is a war criminal,” Biden replied to a journalist who questioned him at the White House after an event dedicated to the fight against domestic violence.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden was “speaking from the heart” after seeing television footage of “barbaric actions of a brutal dictator through his invasion of a foreign country”.
Psaki specified that “a legal procedure (was) still ongoing in the State Department” regarding a legal classification of “war crimes” committed by Russia in Ukraine.
Until now, no US official had publicly used the terms “war criminal” or “war crimes”, unlike other states or international organizations, the AFP news agency reported.
The head of diplomacy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, for example, described last week as an “appalling war crime” the Russian bombing of a complex that housed a maternity hospital and a pediatric hospital in Mariupol, which left three dead. , including a girl, and 17 wounded.
“What we have already seen from the Putin regime regarding the use of munitions dropped on innocent civilians, this already constitutes in my opinion a war crime,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on March 2.
For Moscow, Biden’s definition to refer to Putin is unacceptableKremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told Sputnik in a comment.
“We consider inadmissible and inexcusable this rhetoric from the head of state whose bombs caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people around the world”Peskov said.
Apart from the words, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, who investigates allegations of war crimes in Ukraine, visited that country and spoke today by videoconference with the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski.
Source: Ambito
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