Two years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden qualified of "crazy bastard" Vladimir Putin who quipped; on remarks deemed "rude" but logical. Over the past three years, the American Democratic President has successively called his Russian counterpart a “killer”, a “war criminal” then a “butcher” and finally a “tyrant”. “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,” said Mr. Biden, 81-year-old candidate for a second term, during a meeting in San Francisco, California, with donors supporting the Democratic Party. He spoke in a brief speech Wednesday attended by a small group of journalists. In English, Joe Biden said “crazy SOB”, these last three letters being a shortcut for “son of a bitch”, an insult translatable in French as “bastard”, “asshole”, even “son of a bitch”. It's “rude yes”, Mr. Putin said to a Russian television journalist who questioned him on the subject. But, he added ironically, Mr. Biden was “not going to say to me, 'Volodia (Russian short for Vladimir, Editor's note), well done, thank you, you helped me a lot.'< /p> Russian President Vladimir Putin answers journalists' questions after flying aboard a Tupolev Tu-160M strategic bomber in Kazan, February 22, 2024 © POOL – Dmitry AZAROV Thursday morning, the Kremlin estimated, via its spokesperson, that these remarks were “an immense shame for (…) the United States. If the president of such a country uses such lexicon, it is necessarily shameful”, declared 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, especially 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 that is possible,” he said. added Mr. Peskov. – Easy swearing – The American president, for his part, has the reputation of have easy swearing in private. In March 2021, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he responded in the affirmative to the question from a journalist asking him if Vladimir Putin was “a killer”. US President Joe Biden makes a statement regarding the death of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny on February 16, 2024 at the White House in Washington © AFP – ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS Words not regretted, a White House spokesperson then said. “It’s the one who says it who is!”, Mr. Putin quipped, according to comments broadcast on Russian television. In March 2022, Joe Biden said of Vladimir Putin that he was a “war criminal”, then a “butcher”, each time during brief and spontaneous exchanges with the press. He also said: “For the love of God, this man cannot stay in power.” “A head of state must remain thoughtful”, had then reacted the Kremlin spokesperson. Finally, in October 2023, the American president compared the Palestinian Islamist movement to Putin, described as a “tyrant”, emphasizing that “both want to completely destroy a democracy neighbor”. “Unacceptable” remarks for the Kremlin. During his meeting with donors on Wednesday, Joe Biden also attacked his predecessor Donald Trump, who will in all probability be his opponent in November, and to his reaction to the death in prison of Alexeï Navalny. The Republican assimilated his problems with American justice to political persecution and compared his fate to that of the Russian opponent. “If I had said such a thing in front of you 10 or 15 years ago, you would have thought that I should be forcibly interned,” Joe Biden said. He promised to announce “major” sanctions against Russia on Friday in response to the death of Alexeï Navalny. The American president had launched the same insult of “son of a bitch” at a journalist from Fox News, the favorite channel of Conservatives, in January 2022, while he thought his microphone was off. The AFP then translated the expression as “you bastard”. All rights of reproduction and representation reserved. © (2024) Agence France-Presse
By Teilor Stone
Teilor Stone has been a reporter on the news desk since 2013. Before that she wrote about young adolescence and family dynamics for Styles and was the legal affairs correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining Thesaxon , Teilor Stone worked as a staff writer at the Village Voice and a freelancer for Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, GQ and Mirabella. To get in touch, contact me through my teilor@nizhtimes.com 1-800-268-7116