Originally published 2022-03-27.
The United States does not have a policy of trying to remove Vladimir Putin from power. That was the message US Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered on Sunday 27 March 2022, less than a day after President Joe Biden ended a major speech in Warsaw by saying of the Russian leader that he "cannot remain in power". Speaking at a news conference in Jerusalem, Blinken said:
"We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter."
The episode was brief, but it showed how a single unscripted line from a US president can ripple through a war, and how quickly governments move to separate rhetoric from policy.
What Biden said in Warsaw
Biden spoke on Saturday 26 March 2022 at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, a month after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Much of the speech was a defence of the post-1945 international order. He described the invasion as a direct challenge to the rules that had kept the peace in Europe for decades, and he addressed ordinary Russians directly, telling them the war was not worthy of them and that Putin could and should end it.
Then, at the very end, came a line that was not in the prepared text:
"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."
Heard on its own, it sounded like an American president calling for the removal of the leader of a nuclear-armed state, the kind of statement Washington had carefully avoided since the invasion began.
How the White House and Blinken walked it back
The clarification began almost immediately. A White House official said the president's point was that
"Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region."
The official added that Biden was not talking about Putin's power inside Russia, nor about regime change.
Blinken repeated that line the next day in Jerusalem, where he was meeting Israeli and Arab officials. He framed the remark as a warning that Putin must not be empowered to wage war or commit aggression against Ukraine or anyone else, and stressed that Washington's stated position had not changed.
Biden himself later said he had been expressing his personal moral outrage at what he had seen, including meetings with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, rather than announcing a new policy.
How allies and critics reacted
European leaders were careful to keep their distance. French President Emmanuel Macron told France 3 television he would not use those terms, because he was still talking to Putin and wanted to stop the war without escalation. He added that the United States remained an important ally.
Foreign-policy analysts were blunter. BBC foreign editor Paul Danahar called the comment a calamitous gaffe that played to Putin's agenda and made negotiating with the Kremlin harder. Richard Haass, then president of the Council on Foreign Relations, reportedly wrote that the remark had made a dangerous situation more dangerous, and urged Biden's aides to reassure their Russian counterparts that Washington was prepared to deal with the existing government. The Kremlin, for its part, reportedly replied that it was not for the US president to decide who leads Russia.
Some US commentators described the line as Biden's first major misstep of the war, while others argued he had simply said out loud what many people felt.
Why "regime change" is such a loaded phrase
For Washington, "regime change" carries heavy baggage. It is closely associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Russian officials often point to Western interventions such as Libya in 2011 as evidence that the US topples governments it dislikes. The Kremlin has long portrayed NATO's expansion as a plot to encircle and weaken Russia.
That history is why the phrase mattered so much in March 2022. Analysts feared that a leader who believed his own survival was at stake might escalate rather than negotiate, and that any hint of a US plan to remove him would feed Russian propaganda. Russia also holds the world's largest stock of nuclear warheads, which makes any talk of overthrowing its government especially sensitive.
There was a practical concern too. Ending a war usually requires talking to the people running the other side. If Moscow concluded that the US would never accept Putin, it could see little reason to compromise.
Reading the gap between rhetoric and policy
Episodes like this one are common in diplomacy, and a few simple questions help make sense of them:
- Was it scripted? Prepared texts are vetted across government; an ad-libbed line often reflects personal feeling rather than an agreed position.
- What did officials say afterwards? Formal statements from the State Department or White House usually describe the policy more precisely than a speech.
- Did actions change? In this case US support for Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and diplomatic contacts continued as before. Nothing in US policy shifted toward removing Putin.
- Quote both sides. Reporting the remark without the clarification, or the clarification without the remark, gives a distorted picture.
What happened next
The controversy faded within days, overtaken by the fighting in Ukraine and peace talks that soon collapsed. Putin remained in power, and the war continued. Blinken served as Secretary of State for the rest of Biden's term, from January 2021 to January 2025, and the administration kept to the position he set out in Jerusalem: support Ukraine and pressure Moscow, while insisting that Russia's leadership is for Russians to decide.
Looking back, the Warsaw line is remembered less for any change in policy than as a rare glimpse of how strongly Biden felt about the war. It also became a textbook example for students of diplomacy: a nine-word ad-lib that forced a president's own government, and his closest allies, to spend a weekend explaining what he had not meant. For readers following any international crisis, it is a useful reminder to wait for the formal position before drawing conclusions from a single sentence.
Sources: Euronews, 27 March 2022; Wikipedia: Antony Blinken; original reporting by The Daily Mail.
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