News Desk :
The Kremlin said Monday that President Biden’s remark during a weekend speech in Poland that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” was a cause for alarm.
“This is a statement that is certainly alarming,” Moscow mouthpiece Dmitry Peskov said. “We will keep a close eye on the US president’s statements, we will take note of them and will continue doing this in the future, reports New York Post.”
Putin, who has not spoken publicly about Biden’s comments, was shown on state television Monday meeting with Alexander Sergeev, the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The Kremlin’s initial response to Biden’s Saturday speech was to state that Putin’s fate is “up to the Russian people.” “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden ad-libbed at the end of his 27-minute speech Saturday at Warsaw’s Royal Castle.
The eyebrow-raising remark sent White House officials scrambling to assure reporters that the president wasn’t calling for regime change in Russia, despite Biden referring to Putin as a “butcher” earlier on Saturday while touring a Ukrainian refugee center in Poland.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken continued the clean-up operation during a meeting Sunday in Jerusalem with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.
“I think the president, the White House, made the point last night that, quite simply, President Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else,” Blinken said. The president also answered, “No,” when reporters asked as he left church on Sunday whether he was encouraging regime change in Russia.
But Republican members of Congress called the remarks a “horrendous gaffe” that would feed Moscow’s propaganda machine in defense of Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine.”First, I think all of us believe the world would be a better place without Vladimir Putin. But, second, that’s not the official US policy. And by saying that, that regime change is our strategy eventually, it plays into the hands of the Russian propagandists and plays into the hands of Vladimir Putin,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised most of Biden’s Warsaw speech, but said he shouldn’t have ad-libbed the line about the Russian leader.
