WARSAW — President Joe Biden made an impassioned appeal to the people of Russia to stand up to President Vladimir Putin, to the people of Ukraine to resist, and to Eastern European allies not to fear Moscow’s threats in an address weighted with Cold War symbolism.
Biden implored the people of Russia to reject Putin’s bloody invasion into neighboring Ukraine, an act that has been met with some resistance from both Russian civilians and troops. The Russian leader was “bent on violence from the start,” the president said before striking at the center of the nation’s image.
“These are not the actions of a great nation,” Biden said. “This is not who you are.”
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“‘Be not afraid.’ They were the first words, the first public address of the first Polish pope after his election on October 1978,” Biden said in the address at Warsaw’s Royal Castle, leaning on a message about the “power of faith, power of resilience, power in people” that he said John Paul II brought back to Warsaw in his first homecoming as pope.
“It was a message that helped end the Soviet repression in the central land in Eastern Europe 30 years ago,” Biden said, and one, he argued, “will overcome the cruelty and brutality of this unjust war.
As night fell, the U.S. president told the hundreds of attendees that democracy must prevail.
“Every generation has had to defeat democracy’s moral foes. That’s the way the world,” he said.
The president called on the Russian people to fight the Kremlin’s invasion, casting it as a battle between good and evil, and telling them, “the people of America will stand with you.”
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said, and called for the people of Russia to “fight the corruption coming from the Kremlin.”
Roughly 750 people stood shoulder to shoulder in the courtyard of Warsaw’s Royal Castle to hear Biden speak in a crowd that included Polish lawmakers and local officials, university students, and U.S. Embassy staff. Also in attendance was Polish President Andrzej Duda, whom Biden met at the presidential palace earlier Saturday and near the Ukrainian border on Friday.
Hundreds more lined the cobbled street outside the castle to watch the address on a giant monitor, some waving Polish and U.S. flags. Some were dressed as if for an evening out on the town.
Biden’s suggestion that Putin be removed from power was not a call for “regime change” in Russia, the White House later said. One official insisted the statement should be read as a comment of Putin’s actions over Russia’s neighbors.
“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” said the official. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”
The address capped three days of meetings with Western allies in Europe to discuss the crisis in Ukraine, a grinding invasion by Moscow that Kyiv has resisted for more than 30 days.
The U.S. president spent months rallying leaders to support Ukraine, knitting together a coalition of partners in an attempt to counter Russia’s invasion and impose a raft of heavy sanctions on Moscow that for some nations meant reversing years of policy.
Speaking directly to the Ukrainian people on Saturday, Biden said, “We stand with you.”
Volodymyr Dubovyk, an associate professor of international relations at Mechnikov National University in Odesa, Ukraine, likened Biden’s speech to the March 1946 Missouri address by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in which the leader called on the United States and Britain to stand up to the Soviet Union’s aggression.
“It’s Biden’s Fulton speech,” Dubovyk said, replete with Cold War references and parallels. “And so it is basically a call for to be ready for a new Cold War.”
The U.S. sought to avert the threat of war since last year, but Putin met each proposal with disinterest, Biden said, while repeatedly denying that Russia posed any threat to Ukraine, where troops had massed by the tens of thousands on the shared border.
Biden has said he will not send troops into the conflict, leaning instead on economic penalties to punish Putin’s invasion. The unprecedented scale of the sanctions has crushed Russia’s economy.
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Biden ticked through the crushing effect of the sanctions on Russia’s economy, which have cratered the nation’s currency and decimated its economy, prompting cheers from attendees at Saturday’s remarks.
“This is not the future you deserve,” Biden told the Russian people.
