Biden Calls Putin a Butcher After Meeting With Ukraine Refugees

WARSAW — President Biden called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “a butcher” on Saturday, in response to a question after meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, including several from Mariupol, the city that has been flattened by days of shelling from Russian forces.

Asked what he thinks of Mr. Putin and of what has happened in Mariupol, Mr. Biden said simply: “He’s a butcher.”

His comment came as he visited a stadium in Warsaw where the Polish authorities are assisting the waves of people who are fleeing Ukraine. He shook hands and exchanged comments with people as they crowded around him. At one point, he picked up a little girl with a pink jacket and brown pigtails and took a selfie with her.

Each one of the children, Mr. Biden said, asked for him to pray “for my dad, or my grandfather, and my brother,” who remain in Ukraine.

Biden’s comment drew a quick response. A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the TASS, the state-owned news agency, that personal insults such as this “narrow down the window of opportunity for our bilateral relations under the current administration.”

Poland has received more than two million refugees, by far the largest number of the more than 3.5 million who have fled the fighting.

On Thursday, Mr. Biden announced that the United States would send another $1 billion to help Poland and the other eastern allies with the humanitarian crisis, bringing the total American aid to more than $2 billion since the run up to the invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier on Saturday, Mr. Biden told President Andrzej Duda of Poland that he recognizes the burden his country is under and promised that the American people will continue to provide assistance for the Ukrainian people.

“We do acknowledge that Poland is taking on significant responsibility,” he said. “I don’t think it should just be Poland. It should be the whole world, all of NATO’s responsibility.”