Joe Biden
(Picture: PA Wire)Joe Biden has said Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” as he warned the Russian leader not to move “on one single inch of NATO territory” in a major speech.
Mr Biden made the comments at the end of a speech in Warsaw in which he cast Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a threat to global security and freedom.
However, a White House official later insisted that the President’s comments were not a shift in US policy for a regime change at the Kremlin.
The official said Biden's point was that “Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region.”
Earlier Saturday, Mr Biden had called Putin a “butcher,” shortly after meeting Ukrainian refugees.
The remarks were dismissed by the Kremlin, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying “it's not up to the president of the U.S. and not up to the Americans to decide who will remain in power in Russia”.
“Only Russians, who vote for their president, can decide that,” Mr Peskov added. “And of course it is unbecoming for the president of the U.S. to make such statements.”
He said the remark was “extremely negative” on US-Russia relations.
During his speech, President Biden warned that Europe must prepare itself for a long fight against Russian aggression.
Even as he met with Ukrainian refugees, Russia continued its bombardment of cities throughout Ukraine, inclduding on the city of Lviv, the closest major city to Poland.
Its mayor later said that no civilians were killed during the attacks.
In his speech, Mr Biden said: “If you’re able to listen: you, the Russian people, are not our enemy,” as he evoked the atrocities of the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis.
“These are not the actions of a great nation,” Mr Biden said, in front of the Royal Castle, a landmark in Warsaw that was badly damaged during Adolf Hitler’s war.
“Of all people, you the Russian people, as well as all people across Europe still have the memory of being in a similar situation in the 30s and 40s, the situation of World War Two, still fresh in the mind of many grandparents in the region.”
Biden also criticised Putin for his claim the invasion sought to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. The president of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and his father's family died in the Holocaust.
“It's a lie," Biden said. "It's just cynical. He knows that and it's also obscene.”
He defended NATO, while calling on European nations to end their reliance on Russian fossil fuels.
"The Kremlin wants to portray NATO enlargement as an imperial project aimed to destabilize in Russia," Biden said. "NATO is a defensive alliance that has never sought the demise of Russia."
Mr Biden’s speech comes as Moscow has indicated it could scale back its offensive to focus on what it claimed was the “main goal, liberation of Donbas”, the region bordering Russia in the east of Ukraine.
According to the British Ministry of Defence, Ukraine’s forces are regaining ground around the capital of Kyiv, and Russian troops are suffering from issues with morale.
Meanwhile, an adviser to the Ukrainian ministry of defence, Markian Lubkivskyi, predicted Saturday that Ukraine’s forces could soon take back Kherson, the first major city that the Kremlin’s forces seized.
The port city in the south east, fell to the Russians early this month in their first major gain.
