Russian President Vladimir Putin has entered the US election campaign. When asked which candidate was the best candidate for Russia after the US presidential election in November, in which the Democrat Joe Biden and the Republican Donald Trump are expected to compete against each other, the Russian president uttered a name for the first time: “Biden”. “He is a person with more experience, he is predictable, he is an old-school politician, but we will work with any leader that the American people trust,” Putin said in an orchestrated interview with one of the journalists close to the Kremlin. , Pavel Zarubin.
“Russian President Putin just gave me a big compliment,” replied Donald Trump this Wednesday evening at a rally in North Charleston (South Carolina). “He just said he would rather have Joe Biden as president than Trump. That's a compliment… And of course he would say that,” he said, according to ABC News.
Trump responded to the Russian president's alleged snub after the Republican front-runner in this weekend's race for the White House said he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever it wants” to win without foreign allies The United States would pay its “fair share” of NATO defense resources, prompting an immediate reaction from the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and other Western partners.
Putin's statements in favor of Biden contradict the widespread view in Russia that his plan after the setbacks of 2022 was to hold the line until there is a replacement in the White House who is less inclined to support Ukraine. A Russian source stresses that Trump approved more sanctions against Moscow in his first term than during Barack Obama's administration, although he admits that Democratic support is now clear and the Republican's arrival would be something of a roll of the dice. again.
At the rally in North Charleston, Trump explained the reasons why he believes Putin would prefer Biden to win. “I stopped Nord Stream 2.” [un gasoducto germano-ruso para llevar gas natural de Rusia a Europa]And [Biden] He approved it right after I left [de la Casa Blanca]“So Putin is not really a fan of mine,” Trump said, referring to the sanctions he imposed on the project and their subsequent lifting by Biden. Most critics claimed that the plant would give Russia energy dominance over Europe, the exact opposite of what has happened since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which allowed the United States to become Europe's leading gas supplier.
The supposed preference over Biden also contrasts with the statements that Putin himself made a week ago in the controversial interview with the American presenter Tucker Carlson, an icon of ultra-conservatives. Although the Russian president considered the American leader “predictable,” he admitted that he had last spoken to him before the start of the war. “I think you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by moving away from Russia,” Putin reportedly told Biden three years ago.
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Despite mentioning the name of his supposedly favorite candidate, the Russian president assured that it would be “inappropriate to interfere in the US election campaign.” He said this when asked about Biden's alleged health problems. Last week, the 81-year-old American president confused several European heads of state and government, French leader Emanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with their predecessors who died years ago: François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, respectively.
“I met Biden three years ago in Switzerland,” Putin recalled. Even then they said he was incompetent. I did not see that. He looked at his essay, I looked at mine. Nothing†. But despite his good words, the Russian president has unleashed another blow against the Democrat. “When he got out of the helicopter he hit his head… Well, anyone who hasn't hit their head should cast the first stone.”
The last face-to-face meeting between Biden and Putin took place in June 2021. Russia had begun deploying its troops around Ukraine earlier in the year, and at that summit what ultimately became a crisis appeared to be resolved through a diplomatic ploy by the Kremlin to buy time and prepare its offensive. Both leaders spoke on the phone several times in the following months, and on February 21, 2022, three days before the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Paris announced that the leaders of the United States and Russia had accepted Macron's invitation to a tripartite meeting to Ukraine.
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