As Russia tries to gain a stronghold in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden while speaking in Warsaw, Poland, said Russia has “strangled democracy” adding that its President Vladimir Putin is lying in a bid to justify the war.

Biden said, “Today, Russia has strangled democracy and sought to do so elsewhere, not only in his homeland. Under false claims of ethnic solidarity, he’s invalidated neighbouring nations. Putin has the gall to say he’s ‘denazifying Ukraine.’ It’s a lie. It’s just cynical. He knows that. And it’s also obscene. President Zelensky was democratically elected. He’s Jewish. His father’s family was wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. And Putin has the audacity, like all our autocrats before him, to believe that might will make right,” reported CNN News.

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“Over the last 30 years, the forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe. Its hallmarks are familiar ones: contempt for the rule of law, contempt for democratic freedom, contempt for the truth itself,” he added.

Biden, in his speech, slammed Putin for condemning the NATO alliance. “A criminal wants to portray NATO enlargement as an imperial project aimed at destabilizing Russia. Nothing is further from the truth. NATO is a defensive alliance. It has never sought the demise of Russia,” Biden stated in his address.

The US President also referenced US President Abraham Lincoln’s quote, “right makes might”, in his speech. Biden reiterated his stance on the Russian war in Ukraine and said that Putin is challenging the rules-based international order.

He chided Russia’s actions saying, “It’s nothing less than a direct challenge to the rules-based international order established since the end of World War II, and it threatens to return to decades of war that ravaged Europe before the international rule-based order was put in place. We cannot go back to that. We cannot,” reported the news channel.

Furthermore, Biden talked of the sanctions and other economic steps that are taken in order to pressurize Russia and target the Russian economy.

Russia launched its invasion last month after recognising the Ukrainian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as “independent republics.” Russia has since continued to maintain that the aim of its operations has been to “demilitarize” and “de-nazify” the country.