In his first major post-White House interview, former President Joe Biden conceded that the decision to suspend his 2024 campaign, paving the way for then-Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, was the right call.

“I think it was the right decision,” Biden said in an interview with the BBC News released on Wednesday. But he also admitted, “It was just a difficult decision.”

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Biden defended his presidency by claiming that “no one” thought he could succeed and that his success made it hard not to seek reelection despite past promises to hand the torch to the next generation.

“I meant what I said when I started that … I’m prepared to hand this to the next generation,” he said. “But things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away. It was a hard decision.”

Democrats remain largely divided about Biden’s decision to downplay the struggles with his mental acuity before a disastrous debate against President Donald Trump in June 2024 hastened his exit from the race.

Harris quickly shored up enough support to become the Democratic nominee in late July 2024 but would ultimately lose the presidential race to Trump in November. Harris lost all battleground states and the popular vote to Trump as well.

Biden, however, claimed that the timing of his exit was irrelevant to the race when asked by the BBC.

“I don’t think it would have mattered. We left at a time when … we had a good candidate,” he said about Harris. “She [was] fully funded.”

Some Democrats have lamented that if Biden had not decided to run for a second term, it would have allowed the party the chance to have a regular primary race instead of the accelerated process that led to Harris as the nominee.

The interview was recorded on Monday and released to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, also known as VE Day. Biden chose a British outlet for his first major sit-down as the U.S. legacy press is soul-searching about how it covered his administration.

The BBC interview comes one day before Biden and former first lady Jill Biden appear on ABC News’s The View, which the talk show initially billed as the Bidens’ “very first interview since leaving the White House.”

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, multiple reporters have released new books detailing the extent to which Biden allies shielded the media and public from his declining mental abilities.

Former Biden press secretary and MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki pushed back against the reports of a cover-up, claiming that his decline happened “quite quickly.”

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Biden also attacked Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to give up part of its territory to Russia.

“It is modern-day appeasement,” Biden said as he criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I just don’t understand how people think that if we allow a dictator, a thug, to decide he’s going to take significant portions of land that aren’t his, and that’s going to satisfy him. I don’t quite understand.”