The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has waited this Saturday for the last sentence of his solemn speech at the Royal Palace in Warsaw to ensure that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whom he had called a "butcher" in a meeting shortly before with Ukrainian refugees, “cannot stay in power”.
Biden has also described the Russian president as a "dictator who tries to build an empire" in his speech, the culmination of a European tour undertaken urgently to agree with the continent's allies on a more resounding response to Putin's challenge when it is a month since war in Ukraine.
After participating in three summits in Brussels, of NATO, the G-7 and the EU, he visited Poland as the most representative ally of the group of Eastern countries, which are calling for a more aggressive strategy against the Kremlin.
In a speech full of historical references from the time of the USSR and the fight for freedom as the "task" of this generation, Biden has defended the effectiveness of the "swift and severe" sanctions that the West has applied to stop Moscow and He stressed that they have "reduced the ruble to rubble."
"The Russian economy will soon not even be in the top 20 in the world," he added, flanked by two large vertical flags, one American and one Polish.
The place chosen for the speech, the courtyard of the rebuilt Royal Palace, was full of symbolism.
It is an important building in Polish history that was bombed by the German Air Force at the start of World War II and completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1944 in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising.
More information
Follow live the latest news of the war in Ukraine
The speech began about two hours after, more than 300 kilometers from Warsaw, in the city of Lviv (in the less affected west of Ukraine) two attacks with six missiles took place in the vicinity.
At the time, Biden was chatting with Ukrainian refugees at the National Stadium in Warsaw, converted into a reception center.
It was at that event that a journalist asked him what he thought when he saw the refugees while he had to deal with Putin and he replied: “He is a butcher”.
Biden spoke and took selfies with Ukrainian refugees at the stadium and interviewed members of organizations involved in the humanitarian response.
Poland has received 2.2 million of the 3.7 million refugees who have left the country, according to the latest data from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, updated on Friday.
Shortly before, the US leader met, also in the capital, with the Ukrainian Foreign and Defense Ministers, Dmitro Kuleba and Oleksii Reznikov, respectively, in a meeting that did not appear in the program released by the White House.
More than a meeting to use, it was added to the last 40 minutes (according to the White House) of the hour and a half that the meeting lasted that the two Ukrainian ministers had with the US Secretaries of State and Defense, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, accompanying him.
Meeting between Biden, accompanied on the right by his Secretaries of State and Defense, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, and the Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Oleksiy Reznikov and Dmitro Kuleba, this Saturday in Warsaw. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI (AFP)
After the meeting, the White House issued a statement in which it assures that Biden spoke with the two Ukrainian ministers about "future efforts to help Ukraine defend its territory", without specifying concrete measures.
In a separate note, the State Department noted that Blinken and Austin "promised to continue their support in meeting the humanitarian, security, and economic needs" of Ukraine.
On one side of the table was the American representation and on the other, the Ukrainian.
Journalists have been able to hear how Kuleba told the US president that he had been able to rest on the train from kyiv to Warsaw because he has learned to "sleep in any circumstance" since the war began.
Biden replied that he could also sleep on the trains, because when he was a senator he used them daily to travel between Washington and the state in which he lived, Delaware.
Biden has also met with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, to whom he reaffirmed Washington's "sacred commitment" to Article 5 of NATO, which obliges it to help a member state if it is attacked.
Both countries belong to the Atlantic Alliance.
On Friday, after landing in the Polish city of Rzeszów, some 80 kilometers from Ukraine, the US president met with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Military Division of the US Armed Forces, deployed to reinforce NATO's eastern flank, and He dedicated a few brief words to them that anticipated the bases of his speech this Saturday.
"You are in the middle of a struggle between democracies and oligarchs," he said.
“What is at stake – and not only in what we are doing here to try to help the Ukrainian people and prevent the massacre from continuing – but beyond, is: what is the freedom of your children and your children going to look like? grandchildren?
You are involved in much more than just whether you can ease the pain and suffering of the people of Ukraine."
Follow all the international information on
and
, or in
our weekly newsletter
.
