To the crowd gathered in front of the Royal Castle, the US president told “this tyrant that his days are numbered”.
“Do not be afraid”, he insisted, addressing the words of Pope Wojtyla to the Polish people worried about the bombs that fall a few kilometers from their borders. “The battle for freedom will be long and painful” but the United States, promised Joe Biden, will never abandon Europe to its fate, nor Ukraine, which it will support “until victory”.
After years of disengagement, Europe, is the message that came from the White House, has returned to the center of American foreign policy.
Biden’s gaze goes beyond the borders of the Atlantic Alliance. He tells the Russian people that “you are not our enemies” but Putin, the one who “strangled democracy in Russia” is the “only culprit” of the critical situation he is facing, with the ruble “reduced to rubble” and the Russian economy “out of the twenty most developed economies”.
But the will of a people “is more important and stronger than the will of a single dictator,” the American president alluded.
Phrases unwelcome to Moscow which immediately replied that “Biden’s new insults will inevitably further narrow the window of opportunity to mend relations between Russia and the United States”. A head of state, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov specified, “he should be able to control himself”.
And the White House clarifications that Joe Biden “was not talking about regime change in Russia” were of no avail.