President Joe Biden on Monday said scenes of a massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, is further evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
Biden, speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C., after spending the weekend in Delaware, emphasized the need to collect evidence with which to try Putin as a war criminal.
“What is happening in Bucha is outrageous and everyone sees it,” Biden told reporters on Monday. “It is a war crime.”
The president’s remarks came as he arrived back in Washington from a weekend in Delaware, where he played golf on Sunday with with his brother-in-law, his grandson and his grandson’s friend.
The Associated Press reported on Sunday from Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, detailing bodies strewn across the ground, many with “bound hands, close-range gunshot wounds and signs of torture.” A Ukrainian resident said Russian troops went building to building, removed civilians from hiding, checked phones for anti-Russian activity, and took them away or shot them. Russian troops withdrew from the city on March 30, leaving behind “a scene from a horror movie,” Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the killings a genocide. Asked if he agrees with that characterization, Biden said, “No, I think it is a war crime.”
But instead of blaming Russian troops, Biden placed the blame squarely at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” Biden said Monday. “Well, the truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war criminal.”
Biden said the U.S. will continue to provide Ukraine with weapons to continue fighting and will impose new sanctions on Russia, though he declined to elaborate on what those sanctions might target.
“This guy is brutal,” Biden said of Putin.
