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.
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.
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 after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Bucha and showed reporters the bodies of those killed. Zelenskyy himself called Russian actions a “genocide.”
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.
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.
This report was published on Insider.
