President Joe Biden was in Poland yesterday following the NATO summit. His public remarks to members of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division in Rzeszów in southeastern Poland and with Polish President Andrzej Duda during an event supposedly concerned with the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, were mostly contentless, but he did again call Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. “[T]he single-most important thing that we can do from the outset is keep the democracies united in our opposition and our effort to curtail the devastation that is occurring at the hands of a man who, quite frankly, I think is a war criminal,” he said during the joint appearance with Duda. “And I think it will meet the legal definition of that as well.” Such a statement is intended to rule out the possibility of a Westphalian solution to the current crisis.
The gaffe-prone Biden went even further, however, suggesting that U.S. troops will soon be in Ukraine despite his many statements to the contrary. “And you’re going to see when you’re there. And you—some—some of you have been there,” he told the troops with the 82nd Airborne. “You’re going to see—you’re going to see women, young people standing—standing the middle of—in front of a damn tank, just saying, ‘I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground.’ They’re incredible. But they take a lot of inspiration from us.”
