No apologies: Biden says remark on Putin’s power was about ‘moral outrage’

US President Joe Biden said he would not make any apologies for his remark, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power.

President Joe Biden said Monday that he would make “no apologies” and wasn’t “walking anything back” after his weekend comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” attempting to turn the page on a controversy that clouded his recent trip to Europe.

The president also insisted he’s not calling for regime change in Moscow, which would have represented a dramatic shift toward direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed country.

“I was expressing the moral outrage that I felt toward this man,” Biden said. “I wasn’t articulating a policy change.”

The president’s jarring remark about Putin, which came at the end of a Saturday speech in Warsaw that was intended to rally democracies for a long global struggle against autocracy, drew criticism in the United States and rattled some allies in Western Europe.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said he believed Biden’s comments Monday were “an effective way for the president to move beyond what was an unforced error.” Haass had originally been concerned that aggressive American rhetoric could “make Putin feel like he had little to lose by hanging tough or even escalating.”

Biden rejected the idea that his comment could escalate tensions over the war in Ukraine or that it would fuel Russian propaganda about Western aggression.

“Nobody believes ... I was talking about taking down Putin,” Biden said, adding that “the last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia.”