White House scrambles to backtrack on Biden’s comments on Putin

The White House was scrambling on Sunday to backtrack on comments made by president Joe Biden indicating it wanted to see Vladimir Putin removed as the leader of Russia.

In an ad lib comment at the end of a 27-minute speech in Warsaw on Saturday strongly criticising the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mr Biden said of the Russian president: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

The remark caused consternation as it implied that the United States had adopted a major shift in policy on the future of Russia.

The comments were criticised by both Mr Biden's Republican Party opponents and by foreign policy experts in the US.

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On a visit to Jerusalem on Sunday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said "we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia – or anywhere else, for that matter".

“I think the president, the White House, made the point last night [Saturday] that, quite simply, president Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else,” he said.

The US permanent representative to Nato on Sunday also sought to clarify any suggestion that Mr Biden wanted to see the removal of Mr Putin as Russian leader.

"The US does not have a policy of regime change in Russia. Full stop," Julianne Smith told CNN's State of the Union programme. Ms Smith said the president's comments represented "a principled human reaction" in the moment to the stories that he had heard on Saturday in meetings with Ukrainian refugees who had been driven from their homes by the Russian attack.

She said Mr Biden’s remarks sought to underscore that the international community could not empower Mr Putin to wage war in Ukraine or pursue more acts of aggression following Russia’s invasion of the country .

However senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, described Mr Biden's comments as a "horrendous gaffe". He said he wished that the president had limited his remarks to his official script on Ukraine, which he praised.

“Most people who don’t deal in the lane of foreign relations don’t realise those nine words that he uttered would cause the kind of eruption that they did,” he told CNN. “It’s going to cause a huge problem.”

Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar told ABC that the US's position was "to give all the aid we can to Ukraine" but not to send troops there. She said the policy was not about regime change in Moscow.

Richard Haass, the veteran American diplomat and president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr Biden's words had been counterproductive and damaging. He said they represented a "bad lapse in discipline that runs the risk of extending the scope and duration of the war".

In posts on Twitter, he said the comments made by the president “made a difficult situation more difficult and a dangerous situation more dangerous”.

“That is obvious. Less obvious is how to undo the damage, but I suggest his chief aides reach their counterparts & make clear US prepared to deal with this Russian government.”

“As has been said, you can only go to war with the army you have. No less true is you can only end a war with the adversary you have. That Putin’s Russia has acted criminally does not alter this truth. Regime change may be a hope but it cannot constitute the basis of our strategy”, he said.