President Joe Biden aimed squarely at Vladimir Putin in an impassioned address in Warsaw directed at Ukrainians, Europeans and the global community, blaming the Russian president for the monthlong siege on Ukraine and saying, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
By doing so, Biden drew a red line — but not militarily, as his administration did by denying Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s desperate requests for a no-fly zone Over his country, a move Biden said would lead to “World War III.”
Such strong words by the U.S. president Saturday effectively end any further chance of U.S.-Russia diplomacy, and they set the U.S. and Russia again on opposite sides in an ideological divide that Biden warned would “not be won in days or months,” invoking the painful struggles of former communist nations – including Poland – to separate from the former USSR.
Jeremi Suri, a history professor at
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