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WASHINGTON: Top American officials clarified that the United States does not have a policy of regime change in Russia to play down President Joe Biden’s declaration that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
Biden’s comments in Poland on Saturday also included a statement calling Putin a “butcher,” and appeared to be a sharp escalation of the US approach to Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.
US ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith sought to contextualize Biden’s remarks, saying they followed a day of speaking with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw. “In the moment, I think that was a principled human reaction to the stories that he had heard that day,” Smith told US media before adding: “The US does not have a policy of regime change in Russia. Full stop.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a news conference in Jerusalem that Biden was making the point that Putin couldn’t be empowered to wage war. But Blinken said any decision on Russia’s future leadership would be “up to the Russian people.”
Republicans flatly said Biden’s remarks amounted to an unfortunate blunder. Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Biden’s remarks a “horrendous gaffe” and said he wished the president would have stayed on script.
“Most people who don’t deal in the lane of foreign relations don’t realize those nine words that he uttered would cause the kind of eruption that they did,” he said. “It’s going to cause a huge problem.”
The United States has sought to strike a balance during the conflict in Ukraine to avoid a direct military confrontation with Russia, speeding weapons deliveries to Kyiv to help its military fight but ruling out sending troops into the country or imposing a no-fly zone.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, did not call for regime change in interviews in the United States, but did caution that it was hard to imagine Putin staying in power in a civilized world.
“It’s clear to us that Russia is a terrorist state led by a war criminal … And everyone should be brought to justice,” Markarova said. “So I think it will be difficult to run a state from the Hague.”
The conflict has killed thousands of people, sent nearly 3.8 million abroad and driven more than half of Ukraine’s children from their homes, according to the United Nations.
