U.S. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal’ on Wednesday, a move that is likely to further heighten Putin’s anger.
Biden made the comments indirectly in response to questions from reporters at the White House.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki later said that Biden was only speaking from his heart in the wake of the bombing of children's hospitals in Ukraine, rather than making any official declarations.
He added that there was a separate legal process conducted by the State Department to determine it as a war crime.
Even so, this is the harshest criticism of Putin’s actions made by any U.S. official since the war in Ukraine began three weeks ago.
The statement, however, received a response from the Kremlin who described the expression as unforgivable.
A spokesman for Dmitry Peskov told the Russian news agency Tass that the statement from the head of state that his bomb had killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world, was unacceptable or unforgivable.
