WARSAW — President Biden delivered a forceful denunciation of Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, declaring “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” and casting the struggle because the “test of all time” in a decades-long battle to defend democracy.
Administration officers have been cautious to not trace at Mr. Putin’s elimination from workplace, figuring out that it could be taken by the Kremlin as a harmful escalation. Shortly after Mr. Biden’s speech concluded, the White House insisted that the president was not calling for regime change.
“The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official mentioned in an announcement to reporters. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”
In a speech from a citadel that served for hundreds of years as a house for Polish monarchs, Mr. Biden drew a stark line between the forces of liberty and oppression on the earth. He described the face-off with Mr. Putin as a second he has lengthy warned about: a conflict of competing international ideologies.
“Russia’s choice of war is an example one of the oldest human impulses — using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control,” he declared earlier than a crowd of lots of of individuals. “In this battle, we need to be clear: this battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead.”
The president unleashed an indignant tirade towards Mr. Putin for the declare that his invasion is meant to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Mr. Biden referred to as that declare “a lie,” noting that President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and his father’s household was killed within the Holocaust.
“It’s just cynical. He knows that. And it’s also obscene,” Mr. Biden mentioned.
Mr. Biden mentioned the struggle in Ukraine was nothing lower than an extension of the Soviet Union’s lengthy historical past of oppression, relationship again to its army invasions of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties to finish pro-democracy actions, following the tip of World War II.
Those nations gained their freedom from the Soviet Union, he mentioned, however mentioned that “the battle for democracy did not conclude with the end of the Cold War.”
“Today, Russia has strangled democracy and sought to do so elsewhere,” he mentioned.
The president spoke on to Russia’s residents: ‘Let me say this if you’re capable of hear,” he mentioned. “You the Russian people are not our enemy.” He described the horrors suffered by Ukrainian individuals in the course of the previous month. “These are not the actions of a great nation.”
