by Trevor Hunnicutt, Nandita Bose and Guy Faulconbridge
WASHINGTON/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin praised his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden on Thursday for calling him a “crazy bastard”, saying with a wry smile that the remark illustrated why Moscow preferred Biden to stay in power in Washington, rather than Donald Trump returning there.
Joe Biden spoke Wednesday evening in San Francisco, during a fundraising event for his election campaign, discussing the threats facing the world, citing the risk of nuclear conflict and the existential threat that represents climate change.
“It’s the last existential threat. It’s the climate. We have a crazy bastard like this guy, Putin, and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is the climate,” Joe Biden said in front of a small group of donors.
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The Democratic tenant of the White House used the English term “SOB”, an abbreviation of “son of a bitch”, which can be translated into French as “bastard” or “son of a bitch”.
Asked Thursday on Russian public television about the American president’s comments, Vladimir Putin ironically smiled, biting his lip before looking at the ground.
“We are ready to work with any president,” he said, repeating comments made in the past. “But I think for us, Biden is a more preferable president, and judging by what he just said, I’m absolutely right.”
Vladimir Putin, 71, estimated that his previous similar comments about Joe Biden, 81, had provoked an “adequate reaction” from the American president. “It’s not like he can thank me for helping him. You asked me who (the best American president) is for us. I said it, I say it again, it’s Biden” , he insisted.
“HOLLYWOOD COWBOY”
These comments highlight the difficulty for Vladimir Putin in positioning himself ahead of the American presidential election in November, which should pit Joe Biden, who has publicly insulted the Russian president since coming to power in 2021, against Donald Trump, who promised to quickly end the war in Ukraine if he returned to the White House.
Relations between Russia and the United States have deteriorated to an unprecedented level since the Cold War, between the war in Ukraine, denounced by Kyiv’s allies including Washington as a Russian “invasion”, the death of the opponent Russian Alexei Navalny and American accusations that Moscow plans to deploy a nuclear weapon in space.
Never, until Joe Biden, had a sitting American president publicly used such offensive words to describe a Russian president serving in the Kremlin.
Former US President Ronald Reagan offended Moscow in 1983 by calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire”, while personal insults between leaders were rare during the Cold War.
Earlier in the day, the Kremlin judged that the insult formulated by Joe Biden only “lowered” the person who uttered it and that it was for the American president a vain attempt to look like a “Hollywood cowboy”.
This is not the first time that Joe Biden has used the term “SOB” towards certain people. In January 2022, he used this term against a Fox News journalist when he thought his microphone was off.
Regarding Vladimir Putin, the American president declared in 2021 that he thought his Russian counterpart was a “killer”. Putin later said Biden had called him to clarify the meaning of his remarks.
(Reporting Trevor Hunnicutt and Nandita Bose in Washington, Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; French version Camille Raynaud, Bertrand Boucey and Jean Terzian)
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