Kremlin responds after Biden claims he’s known Putin for 40 years
It is often difficult to fathom what US President Joe Biden means with his statements, including when he claims to have known his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for 40 years, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
Biden lashed out at Putin during an interview with ABC News on Thursday, saying: “I have known him for over 40 years. He has concerned me for 40 years. He is not a decent man. He is a dictator.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Friday, Peskov stated that Putin “does not react and will not react” to insults such as Biden’s.
The spokesman added that he could only express regret that “in international politics at this level such rhetoric and such expressions are employed regarding a head of state.”
Referring to Biden’s claim that he has known the Russian leader for four decades, Peskov added that “sometimes one can only wonder what the US president means, including when he speaks about [knowing Putin for] 40 years.”
Some commentators have already “rolled back time to understand what Putin was doing 40 years ago. One can make very deep analytical conclusions about how Biden could have become acquainted with him [at that time],” Peskov said, prompting laughter from journalists.
The presidential spokesman was apparently referring to the fact that 40 years ago, the then 32-year-old Putin was working for the Soviet security agency, the KGB. Biden was 41 at the time, serving as senator for the US state of Delaware.
The two officially met for the first time in 2011, when Putin held the post of prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev, and Biden was US vice president in the administration of Barack Obama.
Posting on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, conservative commentator and former US Senate staffer Steve Guest wrote that by claiming he had known Putin for four decades, the 81-year-old Biden was “either… lying or he is admitting he was in contact with a KGB agent since 1984 or Biden’s brain is so cooked that he doesn’t know what on earth he is talking about.”
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, citing dozens of people who have been in contact with Biden recently, that beyond his frequent mental gaffes in public, the president is also showing “signs of slipping” in closed-door meetings with US lawmakers.
Biden has directed insults at Putin throughout his presidency, among other things calling the Russian leader a “killer” in 2021 and a “crazy SOB” in February. The Kremlin has denounced the comments as “shameful,” but has declined to respond with equally harsh rhetoric.
