“It’s different than it was last week, the more data comes out,” he continued. “Literally, the horrible things the Russians have done in Ukraine – and we will learn more and more about the catastrophe.” “We will let the lawyers decide, internationally, whether they meet the conditions or not,” he concluded, “but it certainly seems so to me.” It was a dramatic rhetorical escalation in the US view of what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, which Biden had previously considered war crimes. And it seemed to be the most recent example of the President allowing his emotional views on the war to transcend official US policy toward the conflict, even though he expressed a position held by many Americans terrified of the atrocities in Ukraine. He almost immediately won praise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who began accusing Russia of genocide in his country last week. “True words of a true leader @POTUS,” Zelensky wrote on Twitter. “Calling things by their name is necessary to resist evil. We are grateful for the US assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities.” The US government rarely defines atrocities using the term genocide. Previous examples include the Chinese campaign against the Muslim Uighurs and the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority by Myanmar. It has no legal implications, but it does have significant weight, as Biden seeks to bring countries together behind a strategy of isolating and punishing Moscow. Just Sunday, Biden’s top advisers downplayed the importance of characterizing Russia’s actions in Ukraine as genocide. Biden himself said last week that there was no genocide going on. But since then, horror scenes have emerged from Ukraine, including the city of Bucha, where images of dead civilians and mass graves have sparked international outcry. In remarks earlier on Tuesday, Biden said American budgets should not depend on whether a dictator “commits genocide” in another country, an obvious reference to Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Your family budget, your ability to fill your tank, none of this should depend on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide half a world away,” Biden said in Iowa, where he introduced a new rule for ethanol. This was a different attitude than a week ago. “No, I think it’s a war crime,” he said on April 4 when asked if the atrocities unearthed in Ukraine’s Bukha would constitute genocide. While denouncing the war crimes and atrocities, he and his aides have said that the actions observed in Ukraine do not amount to the level of “genocide”. “We have seen atrocities, we have seen war crimes. We have not yet seen a level of systematic deprivation of the Ukrainian people reach the level of genocide,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this month. Administration officials cited the Myanmar genocide just last month as an example of a process used to create the label. It took the United States years to gather evidence to conclude that a genocide was under way. “We will look at a number of indicators in this direction to finally decide on Ukraine,” Sullivan said. On Sunday, Sullivan told CNN’s Jake Tapper that calling it “genocide” was not as important as invoking the horrors. “In my opinion, the label is less important than the fact that these acts are cruel and criminal, wrong and bad and must be answered decisively,” he said. Biden had previously offered views on the situation in Ukraine that go beyond what his government has officially stated. He said in mid-March that Putin was a “war criminal”, a view the secretary-general later told him was a “heartfelt” description. The government officially stated that the war crimes were in progress a few weeks later. It is another moment when Biden precedes the official stance of his government. Visiting Warsaw later in March, Biden said in a speech that Putin “could not stay in power.” He later said that he was speaking after an emotional visit with refugees and that the United States was not pursuing a policy of regime change in Russia. This story has been updated with additional developments on Tuesday.
