WARSAW — President Biden called Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin “a butcher” on Saturday in response to a question after meeting Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, including some from Mariupol, the city flattened by days of shelling by Russian troops.
When asked what he thinks of Putin and what happened in Mariupol, Biden simply replied, “He’s a butcher.”
His comment came when he visited a stadium in Warsaw where Polish authorities are assisting waves of people fleeing Ukraine. He shook hands and exchanged comments with people as they stood around him. At one point, he picked up a little girl in a pink jacket and brown pigtails and took a selfie with her.
Each of the children, Mr Biden said, asked him to pray “for my father, or my grandfather and my brother,” who remain in Ukraine.
Biden’s comment was quickly responded to. A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the state news agency TASS that personal insults such as these “reduce the chances of our bilateral relations under the current government.”
Poland has hosted more than two million refugees, by far the largest number of the more than 3.5 million who have fled the fighting.
On Thursday, Biden announced the United States would send an additional $1 billion to help Poland and its other eastern allies with the humanitarian crisis, bringing total U.S. aid to more than $2 billion since the lead-up to the US invasion. Ukraine.
Earlier on Saturday, Biden told Poland’s President Andrzej Duda that he recognizes the burden his country bears and promised that the American people will continue to help the Ukrainian people.
“We recognize that Poland is taking on an important responsibility,” he said. “I don’t think it should be just Poland. It should be the whole world, all NATO’s responsibility.”