EFE.- Senior US officials insisted this Sunday that Washington was not seeking regime change in Russia and trying to qualify the statement by US president Joe Biden, who on Saturday declared that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, should not remain in power..
Those were just a few words at the end of a 27-minute speech in Polish. “For God’s sake, this man can’t stay in power”Biden said.
The phrase was not in the text his advisor had prepared for him and, soon, The White House was quick to make it clear that Biden had not announced changes in US foreign policywho has gone to great lengths to avoid accusations of interference in Russia’s internal affairs.
Specifically, a White House official told reporters that Biden did not mean to refer to “Putin’s power in Russia,” but simply to emphasize “that the Russian leader cannot be allowed” to “exercise his power over his neighbors in the region”.
Efforts to play down the power of Biden’s words continued this week.
US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, visiting Israel, stated that his government “does not have a regime change strategy in Russia” and repeated the White House’s official line: Biden was not referring to Putin’s removal from “power”, but that he should not be “empowered” to fight in Ukraine.
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A “human reaction” from Biden
United States Ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith also reiterated on CNN and Fox that Washington does not want regime change in Russia..
However, he went a step further and suggested that Biden’s offhand comments were a “humane reaction” to the stories Ukrainian refugees had told him earlier in the day.
The President yesterday Saturday at a football stadium in Warsaw, converted into a refugee centre, and where he embraced a woman, took a girl in his arms and spoke to several children who asked her to pray for their parents, grandparents or siblings. those who are fighting in Ukraine.
“At the time, I thought it was a human reaction to the stories I heard that day,” Smith argued.
Back off?
Despite the government’s efforts to downgrade or explain the president’s comments, it is impossible to back downin the opinion of some foreign policy analysts such as Aaron David Miller, who worked in the State Department between 1978 and 2003.
As Miller put it on Twitter, Biden’s remarks served to confirm what Putin already believed, that the United States wanted regime change, and thus turned the war in Ukraine into Putin’s personal struggle for his own survival.
Right after Biden’s speech, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov believes that it is not up to Washington to decide who will lead the country and asserted that “the president of Russia is elected by Russia.”
In addition, the French government has distanced itself from some of the comments of Biden, who on Saturday also called Putin a “butcher” after meeting with Ukrainian refugees.
Asked about it in an interview on France 3, French President Emmanuel Macron said he would not use “those words” to describe Putin and argued that “everything” should be done to avoid an escalation of the crisis war in Ukraine.
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Republican Critic
In the US, Republican opposition took advantage of this Sunday to criticize Bidenwho came to describe himself as a “blunder machine” to express his thoughts head-on.
In this regard, Senator Jim Risch, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, considered these comments to be a “big problem” and worsen the situation in Ukraine.
“He gave a great speech, but in the end he made this big mistake. I want him to stick to the script.”Risch commented in an interview on CNN.
The president in his speech reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to NATO and framed the war in Ukraine in what he considered a major battle between democracy and world autocracy.
Despite the derailment, some observers such as Georgetown University professor Vadim Grishin believe Biden’s speech is in keeping with history.
In his statement to Efe, Grishin compared Biden’s intervention at the royal palace in Warsaw to two other major speeches: Winston Churchill’s intervention at Fulton in 1946, when he used the term “iron curtain” for the first time, and John F. 1963, when he famously said “Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner)”.
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