President Joe Biden’s unscripted shot at Vladimir Putin on Saturday raised many eyebrows in Washington and has become the target of criticism from world leaders and experts who say his words could inflame tensions and harden Mr Putin’s resolve.
Gen David Petraeus (ret.) became one of the most prominent critics of Mr Biden’s assertion that Russia’s Putin “cannot remain in power” on Sunday in an interview with ABC’s This Week, telling guest host Jon Karl that the moment would not escape Mr Putin’s notice. The president’s remarks were made as he toured Poland, Nato’s front line as the invasion of Ukraine continues, where Mr Biden warned Russia not to tread one inch on Nato-aligned soil.
White House aides spent the next few hours contending to reporters that Mr Biden had not been calling for regime change in Russia.
“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” one administration official told reporters. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”
Those comments will do little to ease the mind of Mr Putin, whom Mr Petraeus contended was a scholar of past US government efforts to topple governments deemed hostile to US interests.
“This will play on his mind,” Mr Petraeus said, adding that it could “complicate things” as Ukraine seeks to reach a peaceful end to the war that has now dragged on for more than a month.
Mr Petraeus, who also served as CIA director under the Obama administration, did not see his view shared by the former director of the Department of Homeland Security under Mr Obama, Jeh Johnson. Mr Johnson was a guest on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he declared that he would not have instructed aides to “walk back” the statement as Mr Biden’s aides did in the hours after his speech.
“I wouldn’t have walked it back,” said Mr Johnson, adding of Mr Putin: “He’s a war criminal. He’s slaughtering innocent women and children. He illegally invaded Ukraine. And he’s got command and control of nuclear weapons.”
Mr Petraeus’s warnings were more in the vein of those shared by French President Emmanuel Macron, who warned that “we should not escalate things” while trying to reach a peace deal.
“I wouldn’t use this type of wording because I continue to hold discussions with President Putin,” Mr Macron said, according to Fox News. “We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without escalation...that’s the objective.”
A spokesperson for the Russian Federation, Dmitry Peskov, flatly rejected Mr Biden’s comments in a statement to reporters declaring that Russia’s people would have the final say on the matter.
The president’s remarks were widely parsed by journalists and foreign policy experts over the past 12 hours and while many have agreed that the remarks were not tactful or even generally helpful as the crisis unfolds, they expressed a commonly-held frustration about the erratic behavior of Mr Putin over the past number of months.
“I guess you can call this a gaffe from the heart,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Aaron David Miller told the Washington Post in an interview, adding: “This is one of those speeches where the one-liner in many ways drowns out the intent of the speech. Because that’s exactly what people are focusing on.”
The US announced its latest round of sanctions, targeting many lawmakers in Moscow’s legislative body, last week ahead of Mr Biden’s visit abroad and the president himself reportedly pledged “further defence cooperation” with Ukraine in a meeting with the country’s foreign minister over the weekend.
