Julianne Smith, the US ambassador to NATO, tried to put Biden’s comments into context, saying they followed a day of talks by the Democratic president with Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw.
The Russian invasion – which has been going on for more than a month – has driven a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people from their homes.
“At the time, I think it was a very human reaction, a statement of principles from the stories I had heard that day,” Smith told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“The United States does not have a regime change policy in Russia. It’s that clear,” he explained.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a news conference in Jerusalem that any decision on Russia’s future leadership “would be up to the Russian people.”
Sen. James Risch, the top Republican senator on the House Foreign Relations Committee, called Biden’s comments a “horrible blunder” and said he wished the president had followed protocol in his remarks during the visit to Poland.
“Most people who aren’t in foreign affairs don’t realize that those nine words that he spoke would cause the kind of commotion that they did,” he told CNN. “This is going to cause a big problem.”