Mar 17, 2022: U.S President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he believes Russia’s Vladimir Putin “is a war criminal” for his attacks on Ukraine.

It was the first time Biden has publicly branded Putin with that phrase.

Biden’s comment came hours Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other top officials met virtually with International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor, who two weeks ago opened an investigation into possible war crimes by Russia.

Biden’s remarks came a day after the U.S Senate passed a resolution seeking to back an investigation of war crimes into the Russian president for the war in Ukraine.

Reports have repeatedly come out from Ukraine of Russian forces targeting civilian premises, including maternity hospital and a theatre in Mariupol city where people were seeking shelter from shelling.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki later said Biden was speaking from his heart about what he has seen on the news about the “barbaric actions by a brutal dictator.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in response to Biden, said, “We consider unacceptable and unforgivable such rhetoric of the head of the state, whose bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” according to the Russian news agency Tass.

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