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- Biden called Russian attacks on Ukraine a “genocide” on Tuesday, a term loaded with significance.
- Just days ago, his top national security aide declined to call Russia’s actions a “genocide.”
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Biden a “true leader” in response.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday labeled Russia’s actions in Ukraine as a “genocide,” using a term loaded with historic and political significance and one that both the Biden administration and past presidents have tried to avoid using.
“Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank — none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away,” Biden said during a speech in Iowa.
Biden was delivering a speech about his administration’s actions to lower gas prices. It’s unclear if his words were a change in his administration’s policy. During a fiery speech in Poland, Biden called for regime change in Russia which White House aides quickly tried to walk back.
As of last week, Biden himself was refusing to call Russia’s apparent war crimes genocide.
“No, I think it’s a war crime,” Biden told reporters when asked about graphic scenes in Bucha.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has also called Russia’s action a genocide, praised Biden and called him a “true leader.”
“True words of a true leader @POTUS,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter. “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.”
Zelenskyy visited Bucha and showed reporters the bodies of those killed. He called for those responsible for alleged atrocities to face a trial similar to what Nazi leaders faced in Nuremberg after WWII.
“Concentrated evil has come to our land,” Zelenskyy said while also labeling the actions a “genocide.”
Zelenskyy advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said at the time that some victims were shot in the head with their hands tied behind their back, and that women were raped before they were killed.
On Sunday, national security advisor Jake Sullivan explicitly declined to call Russia’s actions a “genocide.” International investigations into apparent Russian war crimes are already underway.
“The label is less important than the fact that these acts are cruel and criminal and wrong and evil, and need to be responded to decisively,” Sullivan told CNN.
—JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) April 4, 2022
Sullivan later explained to ABC that the reason he was avoiding using the term was due to the desire to wait until the State Department could conduct a formal investigation.
“We haven’t reached a determination on genocide,” he said. “That is a determination that we work through systematically.”
White House officials have expressed increasing horror over the graphic images and details that continue to emerge from Ukraine. Biden called on Putin to face a war crimes trial in the wake of Bucha.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Russia’s actions in Bucha, which were later verified by The New York Times and other outlets, didn’t “look far short of genocide.”
The US’ historic hesitancy to call something a genocide is well-documented. The Clinton administration told its spokespeople to avoid calling the slaughter in Rwanda a “genocide.” President Bill Clinton later said one of his biggest regrets was not doing more to stop the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 Tutsi civilians massacred by Hutu extremists.
In later released communications, it was made clear that top aides privately debated their response to Rwanda. A legal advisor rejected claims from some human rights organizations that if the Clinton White House called what happened a “genocide” it would not carry a specific legal obligation.
“Concluding that genocide has occurred/is occurring in Rwanda does not create a legal obligation to take particular action to stop it,” Alan Kreczko wrote in an email to a top National Security Council official, NPR reported in 2014. Instead, Kreczko added, “making such a determination will increase political pressure to do something about it.”
USAID Director Samantha Power, who served as one of President Barack Obama’s ambassadors to the United Nations, wrote a Pulitzer-prize winning book about how the US has been reluctant to label atrocities as genocides.
“Every American president in office in the last three decades of the twentieth century — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton — made decisions related to the prevention and suppression of genocide,” Power wrote in “A Problem from Hell: America and the age of genocide.”
She also dismissed the claim that most US leaders didn’t know what was happening.
“… The United States did have countless opportunities to prevent and mitigate slaughter,” Power wrote. “But time and time again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide.”
Multiple future presidents promised to call the Ottoman Empire’s systematic killing of Armenians a “genocide,” but it wasn’t until April 2024, 2021 that Biden finally made a formal designation for the early 1900s atrocities.
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