Joe Biden on Monday defended the unscripted remarks he made at the end of an important speech in Poland at the weekend, in which he said that Russian president Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”, which had prompted hurried efforts by other senior figures in the administration to play down the comment in the face of international criticism.
The US president, when questioned on Sunday after attending church following his return to the White House, denied that he was seeking “regime change” as a new policy.
On Monday, at an event at the White House with director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shalanda Young, to present the 2023 budget proposals, Biden said of his remarks in Poland: “I’m not walking anything back.”
He was adamant that he was not calling for regime change in Russia, and instead was expressing only his personal “moral outrage” at the “brutality” of Putin’s assault on Ukraine, having visited some of the millions of refugees who have fled the war in the last month.
“I was expressing the moral outrage I felt … I had just come from being with those families. But I want to be clear that I wasn’t then, nor am I now, articulating a policy change,” he said.
“I make no apologies for it,” he added, of his remarks on Saturday. » | Lauren Gambino in Washington and Joanna Walters in New York | Monday, March 28, 2022
