Moscow has a preferred outcome of this November’s presidential election in the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.
Speaking with journalist Pavel Zarubin on the sidelines of the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow, Putin touched on the ongoing electoral campaign in the US, saying it would be inappropriate for Russia to meddle in the internal American matter.
When asked who would be better for Russia, the incumbent President Joe Biden or his Republican challenger Donald Trump, however, Putin answered unequivocally.
“Biden. He is a more experienced and predictable person, he is a politician of the old sort. But we will work with any leader who gets the confidence of the American people,” he said.
Putin addressed the media reports about Biden’s cognitive decline by saying he hadn’t really seen it when he met with the US leader in Switzerland three years ago.
“So what if he whacked his head coming out of a helicopter? Who among us hasn’t hit his head on a helicopter, let him cast the first stone,” Putin said. “I am not a doctor.”
According to the Russian president, the only thing that matters to Moscow is Washington’s policy, which he described as “harmful and mistaken.”
Putin also commented on the recent remarks by Trump concerning certain NATO members who weren’t committing as much of their GDP to the military as the bloc requires.
Trump’s approach to NATO “has a certain logic,” Putin said, but so does the position of European countries used to living under the US “nuclear umbrella” with no questions asked. NATO “is an instrument of US foreign policy,” and if the US decides it no longer has use for it, that’s Washington’s prerogative, Putin said. “Let them sort it out themselves.”