On Monday, President Joe Biden called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be tried for war crimes following reports of civilian killings in Bucha, Ukraine.
“One comment to make before I start the day,” Biden told reporters. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal. Well, the truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. This warrants — he is a war criminal. But we have to gather the information. We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue to fight, and we have to gather all the details so this can be an actual, have a war crime trial.”
“This guy is brutal, and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous and everyone’s seen it,” Biden continued, before saying that he will be seeking further sanctions in response.
Biden calls for war crimes trial against Putin:
"This guy is brutal, and what's happening in Bucha is outrageous and everyone's seen it.” pic.twitter.com/acIMb0XVwq
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 4, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Bucha, and described what he saw as “genocide” and “war crimes.
“Dead people have been found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured,” Zelensky said.
“These are war crimes, and they will be recognized by the world as genocide. You are here today and can see what happened. We know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women, murdered children. I think it is more than — this is a genocide,” Zelensky told reporters in Bucha Monday.
French President Emmanuel Macron said there is “clear evidence of war crimes” in Bucha, and that he was “in favor of a new round of sanctions and in particular on coal and gasoline.”
Meanwhile, Russian officials have dismissed the images as propaganda. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called them “stage-managed anti-Russian provocation,” while Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the images contained “signs of video forgery and various fakes.”
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the U.S. State Department would document the shocking violence carried out against Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces.
“You can’t help but see these images as a punch to the gut,” Blinken told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Since the aggression, we’ve come out and said that we believe that Russian forces have committed war crimes, and we’ve been working to document that, to provide the information we have to the relevant instructions and organizations that will put all of this together. And there needs to be accountability for it.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called the deaths of civilians in Bucha a “brutality,” while also “strongly” welcoming International Criminal Court investigation.
Ian Haworth is a writer for The Daily Wire and contributor to Morning Wire. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.