Biden officials scrambled to revise his unscripted call for Putin to be removed from power in his Warsaw speech, report says

• Biden made a recent unscripted remark in a major speech that Putin "cannot remain in power."
• According to a Washington Post report, it sparked a frantic operation to undo what Biden said.

President Joe Biden's team scrambled to clear up the president's ad-libbed call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be removed from power, The Washington Post reported.

In a lengthy account of how Biden has responded to the war in Ukraine, the Post described how officials were caught off-caught by an unscripted Biden comment in Warsaw, Poland, on March 26.

He said of Putin: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

According to the report, citing unnamed sources close to events, as Biden's team "raced to clean up his ad-lib" even before his motorcade left the site of the speech to take him to the airport.

His national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, took the lead in the 37-minute operation to undo the effect of the comment, according to the report.

The Post said his team initially discussed letting the remark stand, but concluded that it had to take action.

In the end, Biden helped to draft a statement clarifying his remarks. It said that Biden meant to express "that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region."

It made clear that Biden "was not discussing Putin's power in Russia or regime change."

Biden's remarks were at the end of three days of diplomacy in Europe, in which Biden sought to consolidate NATO unity in the face of Russia's aggression in Ukraine.

But the remark sparked alarm among European leaders, who said Biden may have inadvertently shut down opportunities for engaging Russia in diplomacy.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has led European efforts to negotiate with Putin, said the day after Biden's speech that he "wouldn't use this type of wording" himself.

He said that leaders "should not escalate things, neither with words or actions."

Foreign-policy analysts said that Biden's remarks could be used by the Kremlin in propaganda, seeming to offer prof that the US has a secret goal to cause a revolution on Russia.

On March 28, two days after the speech, Biden again revisited the remark, drawing a distinction between his belief that Putin should not lead Russia and US policy, which does not involve trying to remove him.

"I was expressing my outrage," Biden said at a press briefing. "He shouldn't remain in power, just like bad people shouldn't continue to do bad things. But it doesn't mean we have a fundamental policy to do anything to take Putin down in any way."