President Joe Biden for the first time Tuesday accused Vladimir Putin’s forces of committing genocide in Ukraine, where Russia was intensifying its campaign to subdue the devastated port city of Mariupol.

Biden’s accusation came as Moscow — already accused by the West of widespread atrocities against civilians — was feared to be readying a massive onslaught across Ukraine’s east that Washington warned might involve chemical weapons.

“Yes, I called it genocide,” he told reporters in Iowa shortly before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington. “It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.”

At an earlier event in Menlo, Iowa, addressing spiking energy prices resulting from the war, Biden had implied that he thought Putin was carrying out genocide against Ukraine, but offered no details. Neither he nor his administration announced new consequences for Russia or assistance to Ukraine following Biden’s public assessment.

Biden later said that he meant to refer to the situation as genocide, and although it seems that way to him, the US will let lawyers decide whether or not it qualifies. “It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is trying to wipe out the idea of being Ukrainian. The evidence is mounting. It looks different than last week,” Biden said.

“More evidence is coming out literally of the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine… we’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies but it sure seems that way to me.”

Earlier, the US President had said that he had not seen any indications of genocide in Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden added that his administration is doing everything possible to lower prices in the US and to address “Putin’s price hike.”

Biden’s comments drew praise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had encouraged Western leaders to use the term to describe Russia’s invasion of his country.

Biden had previously described Putin as a “war criminal” as the discovery of hundreds of civilians reportedly killed in Bucha, outside Kyiv, sparked global revulsion.

But he had stopped short of using the term “genocide,” in line with longstanding US protocol, because of its strict legal definition and the heavy implication the accusation carries.

Adding to the catalogue of horrors emerging from Ukraine, Zelensky sounded the alarm Tuesday about snowballing allegations of rape and sexual assault by Russian forces.

“Hundreds of cases of rape have been recorded, including those of young girls and very young children. Even of a baby!” the Ukrainian leader told Lithuanian lawmakers via video link.

Past American leaders often have dodged formally declaring bloody campaigns such as Russia’s in Ukraine as genocide, hesitating to trigger an obligation under an international genocide convention that requires signing countries to intervene once genocide is formally identified.

That obligation was seen as blocking President Bill Clinton from declaring Rwandan Hutus’ killing of 8,00,000 ethnic Tutsis in 1994 as genocide, for example. 

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