“Such things are very painful for us, so I will definitely do my best to discuss this with him,” Zelenski told a news conference with the leaders of Poland and the Baltic states. Ukrainian soldiers have found the bodies of several hundred civilians killed after the Russian army withdrew from areas north of Kiev, the capital. In Mariupol, on the southern coast of Ukraine, a six-week Russian bombardment has left the city in ruins, killing thousands. Last week, at least 57 civilians were killed in a Russian rocket attack on a train station in Donbass. Anger over Mr Macron’s comments was evident among Ukrainians, who described him as “deaf”, “shameful” and “arrogant”. “So Macron refused to call Russia’s actions genocide and said the Russians and Ukrainians were ‘brothers,’” said Stas Olenchenko, a Ukrainian podcaster. “You know, the kind of brotherhood where one of you rapes, tortures and kills the other because he says you do not exist as a separate person.” Yuriy Myronko, from Lviv, said: “His words about ‘brotherly peoples’ are outrageous. This is a Russian imperial myth that Ukraine is a ‘little brother’.
Use of the term genocide “absolutely justified”
Hours earlier, Biden had described the war in Ukraine as “genocidal” for the first time because “Putin is trying to dispel the idea of even being Ukrainian.” The Kremlin has denied that its forces committed genocide. Dmitry Peshkov, his spokesman, said Biden’s comments were “unacceptable”. “We strongly disagree and consider any attempt to distort the situation in this way unacceptable,” he said. The White House generally uses the term sparingly, although one of the last acts of the Trump administration was to characterize the Chinese treatment of Uighur Muslims as genocide. Some American commentators have described Biden’s claim of genocide as an “emotional blunder,” but historian Simon Schama says his analysis of Russia’s actions in Ukraine is accurate. “Rafael Lemkin coined the genocide in 1944 as ‘the destruction of a nation or a tribal group.’ The United States has pledged another 5 575 million in military equipment to Ukraine, including Humvees, helicopters, drones and Howitzer cannons. That adds up to the. 1.2 billion the United States has already given to the Ukrainian military.
