Joe Biden on Wednesday called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “crazy bastard” during a meeting in San Francisco (California) with Democratic Party donors, during which he also virulently attacked his rival Donald Trump.
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“The existential threat is climate change. There is that crazy bastard Putin, and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear war, but the existential threat to humanity is climate change,” the president said. 81-year-old Democrat, candidate for a second term, during a brief speech attended by a small group of journalists.
In English, Joe Biden used the three letters “SOB”, a shortcut for “son of a bitch”, an insult translatable into French as “bastard”, “asshole”, even “son of a bitch”.
AFP
Thursday morning, the Kremlin reacted, via its spokesperson. “It is a huge shame for (…) the United States. If the president of such a country uses such a lexicon, it is necessarily shameful,” said Dmitri Peskov, in a video broadcast Thursday by a journalist from Russian public television.
“Such rude statements are not capable of hurting the leader of another state, let alone President Putin,” he also said.
“It is clear that Mr. Biden, for the benefit of national political interests, displays behavior in the style of a Hollywood cowboy. He would like that to be the case. I don’t think it’s possible,” Mr. Peskov added.
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During his meeting with donors on Wednesday, the American president also attacked former President Donald Trump, who will in all probability be his opponent in November, and his reaction to the death in prison of Alexeï Navalny.
The Republican likened his problems with American justice to political persecution and compared his fate to that of the Russian opponent.
“If I had said something like that in front of you 10 or 15 years ago, you all would have thought I should be forcibly incarcerated,” Joe Biden said.
The American president had already, in the past, called his Russian counterpart a “butcher” and a “war criminal”.
He promised to announce “major” sanctions against Russia on Friday in response to the death of Alexei Navalny.
Joe Biden, who has a reputation for swearing easily in private, had launched the same insult of “son of a bitch” at a journalist from Fox News, the favorite channel of conservatives, in January 2022, when he thought his microphone turned off. The AFP then translated the expression as “you bastard”.
