Joe Biden on Wednesday called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “crazy bastard” during a meeting with Democratic Party donors in San Francisco, California, where he also slammed 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 short speech attended by a small group of journalists.
In English, Joe Biden used the three letters “SOB,” an abbreviation for “son of a bitch,” an insult that translates into French as “bastard,” “asshole,” or even “son of a bitch.”
AFP
The Kremlin responded through its spokesman on Thursday morning. “It is a great shame for (…) the United States. If the president of such a country uses such a lexicon, it is inevitably shameful,” Dmitry Peskov said in a video broadcast on 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 is engaging in Hollywood cowboy-style behavior in the interests of national political interest. He wants this to be the case. I don’t think that’s possible,” Mr. Peskov added.
- Listen to the American political column with Professor Luc Laliberté about QUB :
At his meeting with donors on Wednesday, the American president also attacked former President Donald Trump, who is likely to be his opponent in November, and his reaction to the prison death of Alexei Navalny.
The Republican compared his problems with the American justice system to political persecution and compared his fate to that of his Russian opponent.
“If I had said something like that in front of you 10 or 15 years ago, you all would have thought that I should be forcibly locked up,” Joe Biden said.
The American president had already described his Russian counterpart as a “butcher” and “war criminal” in the past.
He vowed to announce “significant” sanctions against Russia on Friday in response to the death of Alexei Navalny.
Joe Biden, who is known for swearing easily in private, used the same insult to call a journalist from Fox News, conservatives' favorite channel, a “son of a bitch” in January 2022 when he thought his microphone was turned off. The AFP then translated the expression as “you bastard”.