Senior US officials clarified this Sunday that Washington is not seeking regime change in Russia and they tried to qualify the statements of US President Joe Biden, who on Saturday proclaimed that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin should no longer be in charge of the country. It was just a few words at the end of a 27-minute speech in Poland. “For God’s sake, this man can’t stay in power”expressed Biden, thus blurring the message of his tour of Europe, intended to show the unity of the allies against Moscow.
The phrase was not in the text that his advisers had prepared for him and, immediately, the White House rushed to make it clear that Biden had not announced a change in US foreign policy. Secretary of State Antony Blink, Visiting Israel, he stated that his government “does not have regime change in Russia as a strategy” and repeated the official White House line: Biden was not referring to removing Putin from “power”, but that he should not be “empowered” to wage a war in Ukraine.
For her part, the United States ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, went a step further and pointed to Biden’s off-the-cuff comments as a “human reaction” to stories Ukrainian refugees had told him earlier in the day. The president was on Saturday at a football stadium in Warsaw, converted into a refugee center. “At the time, I think it was a human reaction to the stories that I had heard”Smith argued.
Right after Biden’s speech the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskovconsidered that it is not up to Washington to decide who leads the country and affirmed that “Russia’s president is elected by the Russians”. Even the French government distanced itself from some of Biden’s comments, who on Saturday also had called Putin a “butcher”.
The President of FranceEmmanuel Macron, warned against “an escalation of words and actions in Ukraine”. In an interview on France 3, Macron assured that “I would not use these types of terms because I am still talking to President Putin”adding: “We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without going to war. That is the goal.”
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