Vilnius: During his Wednesday speech at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, US President Joe Biden confused Russia and Ukraine. Only a few days prior, a US State Department spokesman made a comparable error of speech when referring to the ongoing conflict.
By removing its forces from Ukraine, recognising its international borders, and stopping its vicious attacks on Russia, Biden said on Wednesday, "Russia could end this war tomorrow." He quickly corrected himself, "I mean by Russia, on Ukraine.
Biden would miss a dinner hosted by Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda because he was preparing for the "big speech tomorrow" and had just finished "four full days of official business," according to an unnamed US official who spoke to reporters on Tuesday evening. In response, detractors published pictures of Biden unwinding on a Delaware beach on Sunday before his trip to Europe.
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A sympathetic press has attempted to explain away Biden's long history of verbal slip-ups as the byproduct of an alleged childhood stutter. At a spur-of-the-moment press conference held two weeks ago in front of the White House, Biden strangely asserted that Russia was "losing the war in Iraq." Many US media outlets attempted to remove the word "Iraq" from their quotes of him, but his comments were recorded on live video.
But on Monday, the news source Axios claimed that the US president was prone to rage and frequently verbally abused his staff. They even cited a former Senate aide who called Biden a "egomaniacal autocrat... determined to manage his staff through fear" in a memoir from 2012.
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Because of Biden's frequent irrational outbursts, some have suggested the US president may have dementia. In a recent string of Tweets, one of them—former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev—called Biden a "old, rotten, demented stump" and a "ill and miserable old man."
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However, Biden is not the only US official to have recently erred verbally regarding the conflict in Ukraine. On Monday, the State Department's spokesman Matthew Miller twice referred to it as a "strategic failure for Ukraine," despite the fact that reporters in the briefing room in Foggy Bottom intervened to point out that he was most likely referring to Russia.