Macron warns against inflammatory words after
Biden’s Putin remark
French president cautions against verbal escalations
after US is forced to deny it is seeking regime change
French President Emmanuel Macron has called for
restraint in both words and actions in dealing with the Ukraine conflict on
Sunday (March 27), after U.S. President Joe Biden described Russian President
Vladimir Putin as a "butcher" and said he should not remain in power.
"I wouldn't use this type of wording because I continue to hold
discussions with President Putin," Macron said on France 3 TV channel.
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Sam Jones
@swajones
Sun 27 Mar 2022
14.56 BST
The US has
been forced to clarify that it is not seeking regime change in Russia after
president Joe Biden’s suggestion that Vladimir Putin is a “butcher” who “cannot
remain in power” prompted concern and condemnation at home and abroad.
France’s
president, Emmanuel Macron, warned against the use of inflammatory language in
an already volatile situation, while the Kremlin said the “personal insults”
further undermined relations between the US and Russia.
Biden’s
ad-libbed remarks on Putin’s leadership, made during a speech in Poland on
Saturday, were taken by many as a call for the Russian president to be
overthrown.
As Russia
launched symbolic missile strikes on the Ukrainian city of Lviv, 40 miles from
the Polish border, Biden said Putin was “bent on violence”, adding there was
“simply no justification or provocation for Russia’s choice of war” in Ukraine.
He
continued: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
The
president’s comments were swiftly walked back by both the White House and the
secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who insisted the US did not have “a
strategy of regime change in Russia – or anywhere else”.
Macron said
on Sunday that he would not have used Biden’s words, adding that he saw his
task as “achieving first a ceasefire and then the total withdrawal of [Russian]
troops by diplomatic means”.
He told
broadcaster France 3: “If we want to do that, we can’t escalate in either words
or actions.”
Minutes
after Biden spoke, the White House scrabbled to clarify his meaning, saying the
president “was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change”.
According to one official, the speech was not a call to topple the Russian
president, but rather an attempt to prepare the world’s democracies for an
extended conflict.
Blinken was
even more emphatic when he addressed the issue during a visit to Jerusalem on
Sunday. “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,” he said.
“As you
know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of
regime change in Russia – or anywhere else, for that matter.”
Earlier on
Saturday, Biden had been asked what seeing Ukrainian refugees at Stadion
Narodowy had made him think of as he deals with Putin. He replied: “He’s a
butcher.”
Julianne
Smith, the US permanent representative to Nato, told CNN that Biden’s words
were “a principled human reaction to the stories that he had heard that day”.
But she also stressed the US “does not have a policy of regime change in Russia
– full stop”.
However,
Senator James Risch, ranking Republican on the senate foreign relations
committee and a member of the senate intelligence committee, said Biden had
made a “horrendous gaffe” and created “a huge problem” when he went off-script.
“I think
most people who don’t deal in the lane of foreign relations don’t realise that
those nine words that he uttered would cause the kind of eruption that they
did,” Risch told CNN.
“But any time
you say or even as he did suggest that the policy was regime change, it’s gonna
cause a huge problem. This administration has done everything they can to stop
escalating. There’s not a whole lot more you can do to escalate than to call
for regime change.”
The Russian
government said Biden appeared to have lost his cool, adding that it was not up
to the US president to determine who ruled Russia.
“A state
leader should control his temper,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the
state news agency Tass. “Personal insults like this narrow the window of
opportunity for our bilateral relations under the current [US] administration.
It is necessary to be aware of this.”
The Russian
billionaire Oleg Deripaska said Biden’s speech suggested some sort of “hellish
ideological mobilisation” was under way that may usher in a much longer
conflict in Ukraine.
Richard
Haass, the veteran American diplomat and president of the US Council on Foreign
Relations, said Biden’s words had been counter-productive and damaging.
“The
comments by @potus made a difficult situation more difficult and a dangerous
situation more dangerous,” Haass wrote on Twitter.
Tobias
Ellwood, the British MP who serves as the chair of the Commons defence select committee
said the comment had been “unwise” and would be seized on by Putin.
“It’s for
the Russian people to draw this (obvious) conclusion,” Ellwood wrote on
Twitter. “Putin/Xi (& many Russians) will now read ‘regime change’ as
POTUS’ wider objective – beyond supporting Ukraine. Putin will spin this, dig
in and fight harder.”
Nadhim Zahawi, the British minister for
education, told Sky News the Russian people would “decide the fate of Putin and
his cronies”.
Asked whether Biden had been wrong to say what
he had, the education secretary said: “The president gave a very powerful
speech on this and I think both the US and the UK agree that it’s up to the
Russian people to decide who should be governing them.”
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