The US President gave a speech at the Royal Castle in Warsaw on Saturday evening.
(Photo: REUTERS (M))
Warsaw In what has been announced as a historic speech at the end of his two-day trip to Poland, US President Joe Biden called for the removal of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” he said on Saturday. “You, the Russian people, are not our enemy.”
“That’s not who you are, that’s not the future you deserve for your family,” Biden said. “This war is not worthy of you.” He recalled that 200,000 Russians had already left their homeland.
Biden also prepared the world for a long conflict over the future international order. It is about a “great battle between democracy and autocracy, between freedom and oppression, between a rule-based order and one that is determined by brute force,” Biden said on Saturday evening.
“We have to be clear about this: This battle will not be fought in days or in months. We have to steel ourselves for a long fight.” This was determined by the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.
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US President Joe Biden has promised Poland loyalty to the NATO alliance in view of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. “We consider Article Five to be a sacred obligation and you can rest assured of that,” Biden said at a meeting with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw on Saturday.
Joe Biden thanked Poland for taking in the refugees from Ukraine
(Photo: dpa)
He assumes that Russian President Vladimir Putin “expected to be able to split NATO, to be able to separate the east flank from the west,” Biden said. But he wasn’t able to do that.
Biden called the Russian President a “butcher” in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the US President has expressed reservations about recent suspicions that Russia may have changed strategy in the Ukraine war. He’s not sure. Recently there have been indications that Russia is moving the military operation in Ukraine away from the capital Kyiv to the Donbass in the east of the country.
The White House was then forced to clarify that Biden had not called for regime change in Russia in his speech. When he said “Putin cannot remain in power,” the US President meant that he should not exercise power over neighboring countries or the region, says a spokesman for the US President’s Office. Biden did not talk about Putin’s power in Russia or regime change.
Biden also thanked Poland for taking in the refugees from Ukraine. “We recognize that Poland is taking on a great responsibility, which I believe should not only concern Poland. It should be the responsibility of the whole world, of all NATO,” said the US President. “We understand the fact that so many Ukrainians are seeking refuge in Poland, because we have thousands of people on our southern border who (…) try to get to the United States every day.”
Biden: Russia’s economy will be ‘halved’ over sanctions
According to US President Biden, the Russian economy will “halve” in the coming years because of the tough Western sanctions. Before the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, Russia was the eleventh largest economy in the world, soon Russia will hardly be among the 20 largest, said Biden in Warsaw on Saturday at the end of a two-day visit to Poland.
The sanctions are said to be so effective that they compete with “military power”. The economic cost is also undermining the Russian military, Biden said. “As a result of these unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was reduced to rubble almost immediately,” Biden said, referring to the dramatic devaluation of Russia’s national currency. “The economy is poised to be halved in the coming years,” he said.
Poland wants to work closely with the US on nuclear power
According to the Kremlin, Biden’s comments make diplomatic approaches more difficult. The Tass news agency quoted a Kremlin spokesman as saying that this would reduce the prospects for better relations.
The two presidents also discussed a planned Polish entry into nuclear power. According to President Andrzej Duda, Poland wants to work closely with the United States. “I believe that together with American companies, but under the strong auspices of the White House, we can implement this program in the near future, because it is urgently needed by Poland,” Duda said on Saturday in Warsaw after a meeting with the US President Joe Biden.
Poland needs US nuclear power plants to implement climate protection and to secure a modern energy supply. So far, Poland has no nuclear power plants. However, the national conservative PiS government is relying on nuclear power to phase out coal.
The two preferred locations are near the Baltic Sea, a good 70 kilometers from Gdansk. According to the strategy paper “Poland’s energy policy up to 2040”, construction of the first reactor block should start by 2026 at the latest, and it should be connected to the grid in 2033. Five more reactor blocks are to follow by 2043.
Following his meeting with Duda, Biden wanted to meet refugees in Warsaw in the afternoon and finally give a speech on the war in Ukraine. It is the second day of his trip to Poland. The return to the USA is on Saturday evening.
More: Misjudgment, logistics and the West: why Putin’s offensive failed for the time being