Evening summary
Good evening. We’re closing the US liveblog for the weekend. Here’s where things stand at the close of business on Friday.
- Joe Biden visited Rzeszow, Poland, a city about an hours-drive from the border with Ukraine, where he met with US troops, listened to an update on the growing humanitarian crisis and praised the bravery of the Ukrainian people.
- Biden will deliver a “major” address on the war in Ukraine tomorrow, speaking from Warsaw after a trio of international summits in Brussels before he returns to the US.
- Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas was discharged from the hospital on Friday, a week after he was admitted for what the court said was an infection. It comes as the congressional panel investigating the January 6 assault on the US capitol weights whether to seek testimony from his wife, Ginni Thomas, after it was revealed that she exchanged text messages with Donald Trump’s chief of staff, urging him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
- Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, will vote to confirm Biden’s nominee for the supreme court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, all but ensuring she will be the first Black woman to sit on the bench. He also signalled a willingness to restart a conversation about the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda, which he stalled.
- In some late-breaking news (at least for us on the politics blog), the Supreme Court blocked a lower court order that prevented the Biden administration to from restricting the deployment of Navy SEALs who refused to be vaccinated against covid-19.
For those interested in reading more about the war in Ukraine, please follow our global liveblog with updates, analysis and insights from our reporters around the world.
Updated
Speaking in Poland earlier today, Biden compared the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s brutal invasion to the the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 while reaffirming his belief that Russian president Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal.”
“I mean, talk about what happened to Tiananmen Square,” he said. “This is Tiananmen Square squared.”
He said that Putin was “a man who, quite frankly, I think is a war criminal” and added that he thinks the Russian leader’s actions will “meet the legal definition” of a war criminal under international law. This week the US determined that the Russian military had committed war crimes in Ukraine, citing examples of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, including a maternity hospital and a theater where Ukrainians had taken refuge.
Speaking to US troops stationed in Poland, Biden said: “You’re in the midst of a fight between democracies and autocrats. What you’re doing is consequential, really consequential.”
Biden will deliver a “major” speech laying out the stakes of the war in Europe from Warsaw, before returning to the US on Saturday.
