On a sunny Sunday afternoon in downtown Warsaw, the overheard conversations in and around the Royal Palace in the old town revolve around coffee, ice-cream, Ukraine and Joe Biden.
No visible trace remains of the US president and his address in the palace courtyard, but his words continued to echo around the world on Sunday, in particular his calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin a “dictator” who “cannot remain in power”.
While the Biden administration spent Sunday walking back the president’s remarks, insisting he was not calling for regime change in Moscow, his intended audience in Poland did not seem concerned. Hours after his speech, most seemed elated.
Polish politics is a bare-knuckle business and rough rhetoric the norm. And many here cheered when the US president, near the end of his speech, made what appeared to be an unscripted outburst: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
“I thought that was a really clever remark in a fantastic speech,” said Jacek Kwasniewski in the old town. “Unless the Russians remove Putin we are going to have a new cold war, and shifting tectonic plates between Russia and the liberla West, with Poland trapped in the middle.”
The primary aim of Biden’s speech, ending a two-day visit to Poland, was to convince this nervous central European country and Nato ally that, no matter what Putin has planned, the defence alliance – and the US in particular – has Poland’s back.
To many Polish ears, this was a pitch-perfect address, acknowledging Poland’s huge humanitarian efforts in the month-long war and acknowledging that Polish fears of Russia are well grounded in bitter and painful historical experience.
Biden described the Russian leader as “a dictator bent on rebuilding an empire” who “will never crush a people’s love for liberty”. Encroachments on Nato territory, he warned, would be driven back “by the full force of our collective power”.
“There is simply no justification or provocation for Russia’s choice of war,” he told a cheering audience. “It is an example of one of the oldest human instincts: using brute force to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.”
For many here, the emotional high point of his speech was hearing him cite a speech of the late Polish pope, St John Paul II, when he returned to his homeland in 1979. Then, Poland was still a satellite state of Moscow, a fate many here fear awaits Ukraine
“Never ever give up, never doubt, never tire, never become discouraged,” urged Biden of Ukraine, citing the late pope. “Be not afraid.”
The media reviews were all good, with the Rzeczpospolita daily making favourable comparisons to Winston Churchill’s 1946 “iron curtain” speech. Gazeta Wyborza newspaper said Poles would “remember this strong speech for some time”. It understood the “for God’s sake” remark as Biden, unlike French and German leaders, closing the door on diplomacy with Putin.
Not everyone in Warsaw was as impressed by Biden’s address as the palace crowd. Some 2,000 people held a lie-down protest in front of the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science, demanding “action, not more words” from the president.
But in a sign of the grave situation on its border, Biden achieved the impossible in modern Polish politics: agreement among politicians of all hues.
Even the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party appeared happy to hear Biden’s remark on the “perennial struggle for democracy”, and the need for the rule of law and freedom of the press as non-negotiables in a free society.
Since taking office in 2015, critics at home and abroad accuse PiS of working consistently to politicise the courts, undermine the media and discriminate against the LGBT community and other minorities.
After a month of shock at the war on its doorstep, it seems that Biden’s speech reactivated Poland’s own domestic battle for a free society.
Outside Warsaw’s presidential palace on Sunday afternoon, dozens of demonstrators accused their government of “Putinising” Poland.
“Putin wants the disintegration of western democracies and its values, and Poland’s ruling party have been doing just that, along with Orban in Hungary,” said Piotr Koziol, one of the demonstrators. “They pretend to be with the West now, a pillar of western liberal values, but this is just a bad piece of theatre for American visitors”.
