When President Biden went off script and said Vladimir Putin could no longer remain in power, he was only saying the quiet part out loud. Yes, White House staff was caught off guard and had to go into damage control following the president’s ad-libbed remarks, but don’t kid yourself. He was only stating publicly what has almost certainly been discussed privately since the war in Ukraine began.
Our objective in this war is regime change in Moscow. The president already has called, excuse me, Putin, a war criminal. Well, what exactly does that mean? Is there a negotiated settlement? Is the US willing to leave a war criminal in power? No, of course not.
It has been our policy to …have a regime change. Now, the reason it was pulled back was that it will make a settlement, if one is to happen, much more difficult. Why after all would Putin negotiate the end to a war if he knows he’s going to be arrested and tried as a war criminal. It just doesn’t make sense.
And that’s why the staff president’s staff was so eager to walk back his comment.
It’s not an accident that since the Warsaw speech, Biden has only turned up the heat with his public comments about Putin and the Russian military’s actions in Urkaine. He called Putin’s invasion “a genocide” recently and followed up with more comments reiterating that stance. U.S. officials also said they’ve confirmed Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine, and the president has called for a war crimes trial.
What we are quite certain of is that the sanctions we’ve enacted to cripple Russia economically are in place for the long haul. If a regime change does occur in Russia–say, the chance that people there finally reach a breaking point with Putin’s rule–those sanctions which have significantly impacted Russia’s economy could be a key reason. Of course, even if Putin is removed from power, whoever steps in to fill the power void should expect the sanctions to remain in place for quite some time.
