President Biden Accurately Accuses Vladimir Putin of Genocide In Ukraine, Media Clutches Its Pearls

President Joe Biden speaks with the moral clarity that has been lacking in presidents, in particular from the moral degenerate and seditious criminal who previously occupied the White House.

The media made Donald Trump president. Donald Trump said insane, dangerous things all the time, and the media covered it like it was reality show entertainment. Donald Trump was good for their ratings, so the media played along. So fuck them.

We are living under the existential threat of World War III with the nuclear terrorist state of Russia. President Biden understands the role that fate has thrust upon him.

Winston Churchill, only a back bencher in the British Parliament at the time, not a member of the cabinet, was the loudest critic of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s, and spoke with the same moral clarity. See, The Gathering Storm: In the midst of Britain’s scramble for peace through appeasement, Churchill predicted, “that the day will come when… you will have to make a stand, and I pray to God that, when that day comes, we may not find through an unwise policy, that we have to make that stand alone.” After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939: “This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland,” Churchill declared, “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man.”

Churchill became Prime Minister During World War II, and his moral clarity about Hitler got him crosswise with his own government and the Allies. Hitler must die without trial – Churchill:

Winston Churchill believed Adolf Hitler should be executed without trial if he fell into British hands at the end of the Second World War, a view that put the Prime Minister on a collision course with his political allies.

The wartime leader argued passionately in cabinet meetings that Hitler was ‘the mainspring of evil’ and ‘an outlaw’, and said trials of top Nazis would simply be a ‘farce’. His views contrasted sharply with those of the Russians and Americans who advocated trials to determine the fate of the Nazi leaders.

According to the wartime cabinet minutes, Churchill said the idea of what he believed would be mock trials was objectionable. ‘It is really a political act: better to declare that. We shall put them to death,’ Churchill said.

During a cabinet meeting on 14 December, 1942, he observed that ‘if Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death’. In what appears to be a grim joke, and a nod to executions used by his US allies, he suggested the ‘electric chair, for gangsters, no doubt available on lease lend’.

But, as the war reached its climax, the cabinet had become aware of the reservations of the Allies. ‘I would take no responsibility for a trial, even though the US want it,’ Churchill observes. ‘Execute the principal criminals as outlaws – if no ally wants them.’

So when President Biden accurately says that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and is committing genocide in Ukraine, spare me the pearl clutching from the Beltway media. He knows that he has to be the voice of moral clarity for our era. He must lead the world against the tyranny of Vladimir Putin and the nuclear terrorist state of Russia.

The Associated Press reports, Biden: Russia war is genocide, trying to ‘wipe out’ Ukraine:

President Joe Biden now says Russia’s war in Ukraine amounts to genocide, accusing President Vladimir Putin of trying to “wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.”

“Yes, I called it genocide,” he told reporters in Iowa on Tuesday shortly before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington. “It’s become clearer and clearer.”

Biden’s comments drew immediate praise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had encouraged Western leaders to use the term to describe Russia’s invasion of his country. But French President Emmanuel Macron declined to take his rhetoric that far in comments Wednesday.

Because Macron is in a runoff election against a Putin puppet, the far-right Marine Le Pen. She is the Vichy French collaborator with fascism of this era. Macron cannot afford to lose France to another Vichy French collaborator.

“I am prudent with terms today,” Macron said. “Genocide has a meaning. The Ukrainian people and Russian people are brotherly people. … I’m not sure if the escalation of words serves our cause.”

Macron [conceded that] it’s been established that the Russian army has committed war crimes in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy applauded Biden’s assessment.

“True words of a true leader @POTUS,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil. We are grateful for US assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities.”

Here you are, Macron. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, following the Holocaust perpetrated by Adoplh Hitler. The Convention defines “genocide”:

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.

Vladimir Putin and his Russian military have checked all of these boxes.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into two rebel-held regions in eastern Ukraine, recognizing the regions as independent, he returned to a familiar argument that the Kremlin has pushed for years: that Ukraine’s claim to statehood is entirely baseless. In a televised address to the nation, Putin explicitly denied that Ukraine had ever had “real statehood,” and said the country was an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space.” How Putin’s Denial of Ukraine’s Statehood Rewrites History.

Ukraine’s government is “openly neo-Nazi” and “pro-Nazi,” controlled by “little Nazis,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says. Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine:

The language of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been dominated by the word “Nazi” — a puzzling assertion about a country whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and who last fall signed a law combating anti-Semitism. Mr. Putin only began to apply the word regularly to the country’s present-day government in recent months, though he has long referred to Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution of 2014 as a fascist coup.

The “Nazi” slur’s sudden emergence shows how Mr. Putin is trying to use stereotypes, distorted reality and his country’s lingering World War II trauma to justify his invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin is casting the war as a continuation of Russia’s fight against evil in what is known in the country as the Great Patriotic War, apparently counting on lingering Russian pride in the victory over Nazi Germany to carry over into support for Mr. Putin’s attack.

“This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive,” scholars of genocide and Nazism from around the world said in an open letter after Mr. Putin invaded. While Ukraine has far-right groups, they said, “none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”

Ukrainians say that the horrors of Russia’s invasion show that if any country needs to be denazified, it is Russia. Its war has brought devastation to Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and widespread suffering to Kyiv.

Many believe that Mr. Putin’s stated determination to “denazify” Ukraine is code for his aim to topple the government and repress pro-Western activists and groups.

Ukrainians have closed ranks behind Mr. Zelensky, however, causing Mr. Putin to escalate the brutality of his war. Mr. Putin’s “denazification” mission increasingly means that he is determined to “destroy all Ukrainians,” the country’s information minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, wrote on Facebook, in Russian, last week.

“This is worse than Nazism,” Mr. Tkachenko wrote.

Russia has bombed hospitals, includig a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Mariupol Maternity Hospital Destroyed By Russian Air Strike, Triggering Global Horror, Outrage:

A Russian air strike has devastated a maternity hospital in the beleaguered port of Mariupol and wounded at least 17 people, Ukrainian officials said, triggering international condemnation from Washington, London, and the Vatican, among others.

The hospital bombing came as humanitarian corridors set up to let civilians flee several besieged cities around Ukraine failed to materialize on the scale expected because of continued fighting, leaving hundreds of thousands trapped without basic supplies because of Moscow’s unprovoked invasion.

The Guardian reports, Hundreds of Ukrainians forcibly deported to Russia, say Mariupol women:

Russian forces are sending Ukrainian citizens to “filtration camps” before forcibly relocating them to Russia, according to the accounts of two women who said they were transported to Russian territory from the besieged city of Mariupol last month.

“On 15 March, Russian troops stormed into our bomb shelter and ordered all the women and children to get out. It was not a choice,” said one woman who had been hiding with her family in a suburb of Mariupol since early March. “People need to know the truth, that Ukrainians are being moved to Russia, the country that is occupying us.”

Ukrainian officials have accused Russian troops of transporting several thousand Mariupol residents through “filtration camps” and forcibly moving them to Russia through the Russian-controlled republics in eastern Ukraine.

Their accounts, along with similar stories published by the Washington Post and the BBC and reports from human rights groups, contradict Russian claims that Ukrainians are not being forcibly moved to Russia.

* * *

The reported deportations have raised alarm among international human rights groups.

“These people weren’t given any option to evacuate to a safer place in Ukraine. Many found themselves in a situation when their only choice was essentially crossing into Russia or dying as shelling grew more intense,” said Tatyana Lokshina, associate director for the Human Rights Watch’s Europe and central Asia division.

“Under international human rights law, forced displacement or transfer doesn’t necessarily mean people were forced into a vehicle at gunpoint, but rather that they found themselves in a situation that left them no choice.”

Lokshina pointed to the Geneva convention, under which “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

Russia is not running “death camps” like Nazi Germany did, none that have been reported. Russia doesn’t need to. The Russian military is shelling civilian residential areas and killing residents where they live. By the thousands. Others have been executed, shot after being tortured, with their hands bound. The Russian military is exterminating Ukrainians, many of them Russian-speaking Ukrainians like the residents of Mariupol that Putin supposedly wanted to “liberate” from Ukraine’s government.

So yes, Putin is engaging in genocide in Ukraine. This is undeniable. Spare me all the French “diplomat speak.”

Then you see pearl clutching analysis like this from Calvin Woodward at the AP. When Biden ‘speaking from his heart’ doesn’t speak for US:

There’s no such thing as a purely personal opinion from the Oval Office on policies that matter. Armchair quarterbacking when you’re the president is fraught when you’re the one with the ball.

Armies can move on your words; markets can convulse; diplomacy can unravel.

That has not stopped President Joe Biden from viscerally weighing in on the Ukraine war — labeling Russia’s Vladimir Putin a war criminal, appearing to advocate an overthrow in Moscow, branding Russian war actions as genocide — then saying it’s all his personal, not presidential, opinion.

It’s sowing confusion in dangerous times. [Says you.]

[On] consequential superpower subjects, Biden these days is “speaking from his heart,” his aides have said repeatedly. Not unlike his predecessor, he is reacting at times to what he sees on TV. He’s not always to be taken literally, it is argued.

A declaration of genocide is history’s harshest judgment against a country, one that can bind the signers of a United Nations treaty to intervene. [Exactly!] Concern about that obligation dissuaded the U.S. from recognizing the Rwandan Hutus’ killing of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in 1994 as genocide. [It was disgraceful.] It took more than a century for a U.S. president, Biden last year, to recognize the Armenian genocide.

But in remarks in Iowa on Tuesday, Biden equated Russia’s mass killings of Ukrainian civilians to genocide and stuck with that position on his way back to Washington: “Yes, I called it genocide,” he affirmed.

Lawyers will decide if Russia’s conduct met the international standard, the president added, but “it sure seems that way to me.”

[At] the White House last month, Biden said of Putin, “I think he is a war criminal,” in response to a shouted question as he walked out of an unrelated bill-signing reception. He said the same again when visiting U.S. troops in Poland.

The White House hastened to say that did not necessarily signal U.S. policy.

“He was speaking from his heart and speaking from what he’s seen on television, which is barbaric actions by a brutal dictator, through his invasion of a foreign country,” said press secretary Jen Psaki.

Psaki on Wednesday dismissed the notion that anyone was confused by the idea of Biden’s personal comments not reflecting federal policy. She said Biden ran for office promising “he would shoot from the shoulder, is his phrase that he often uses, and tell it to them straight. And his comments yesterday, not once but twice, and on war crimes are an exact reflection of that.”

As well, after meeting Ukrainian children torn from their families in the war, Biden sent his staff scrambling to explain his apparent endorsement of Moscow regime change when he said of Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

“I was expressing the moral outrage that I felt toward this man,” Biden said days later. “I wasn’t articulating a policy change.”

Or more pearl clutching from Tyler Page at the Washington Post, Biden’s blunt comments on Ukraine can veer from U.S. policy:

President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” although U.S. officials had not made that legal determination. During his trip to Europe last month, he seemingly urged regime changein an ad-libbed line at the conclusion of a speech in Warsaw, then clarified he was expressing “moral outrage” rather than articulating American policy.

Then on Tuesday, the president once again veered from his prepared remarks, labeling Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine a “genocide,” despite top U.S. officials saying last week they had not yet seen evidence of actions meeting that definition, and even though a legal review on the matter has not been completed.

Biden’s off-the-cuff comment marked the latest example of the tension between his often-emotional response to Putin’s brutal war and the international implications of a president’s words. Throughout his political career, Biden has cultivated a reputation for unscripted candor, a trait allies laud as humanizing but adversaries deride as undisciplined.

“I’m impressed by the fact that if he’s horrified and moved by what he’s witnessing, as we all are, that he doesn’t couch it in nice language,” said Harold Koh, who served as legal adviser at the State Department during the Obama administration. “He says what he thinks it is. I’d rather have more politicians be more candid than be more clever with their words.”

But in the midst of the largest land war in Europe since World War II, Biden’s tendency to deviate from official U.S. policy has the potential to complicate efforts to end the conflict and confuse allies and partners, some diplomats say.

Or this somewhat more accurate reporting from Agence France-Presse, Dismissing more moderate voices, Biden is Putin’s accuser-in-chief:

The latest, most striking example: Biden’s accusation of a Russian “genocide,” during a Tuesday speech on biofuels and helping Americans with the cost of living.

Going further than any top administration official to date, Biden for the first time used the loaded term to characterize attacks on Ukrainian civilians by Putin’s forces.

The White House, as in the past, prepped journalists behind the scenes that a clarification would be coming — but, notably, none has.

Instead, asked later if he’d meant what he said, Biden doubled down.

“Yes, I called it genocide,” said the president, adding that he would let lawyers decide “whether or not it qualifies” as such.

“It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian.”

Biden is right. The question is, what is the world going to do to stop Vladimir Putin and the nuclear terrorist state of Russia in Ukraine before it spreads to a theater war in Europe, or possibly World War III?

Addressing reporters Wednesday, the US envoy to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Michael Carpenter, reiterated that it will be for international law experts to weigh the evidence and determine if Russia’s actions meet the definition of genocide.

“That’s going to take some time to be completed but in the meantime the president has made a very clear moral determination on this issue,” he said.

[A] European diplomat told AFP Biden was trying to thread the needle of speaking in terms that would be sufficiently robust to satisfy Congress while avoiding harming the pursuit of a negotiated settlement.

This criticism comes from the same media which has often treated Vladimir Putin favorably for over 20 years as a leader despite his numerous previous atrocties in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, shooting down a civilian jet liner over Ukraine, and his invasion of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. He has had journalists murdered, and poisoned and imprisoned his political opponents. But the media were more than happy to attend the Winter Olympics (2014) and World Cup soccer (2018) hosted by Russia as if nothing ever happened.