Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden called President Vladimir Putin a “crazy bastard” during a meeting in San Francisco with Democratic Party donors, comments the Kremlin said were “shameful.”
Over the past three years, the American president has successively called his Russian counterpart a “killer”, “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 the 81-year-old Democratic president, candidate for a second term.
He was speaking during a brief speech Wednesday attended by a small group of journalists in San Francisco, California.
In English, Joe Biden used the three letters “SOB”, a shortcut for “son of a bitch”, an insult translatable into French as “bastard”, “asshole”, even “son of a bitch”.
Thursday morning, the Kremlin reacted, via its spokesperson. “It’s a huge shame for […] United States. If the president of such a country uses such a lexicon, it is necessarily shameful,” said 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, let alone 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 it’s possible,” Mr. Peskov added.
Easy swearing
The American president, who has a reputation for swearing easily in private, had already, in the past, called his Russian counterpart a “butcher” and a “war criminal.” »
In March 2021, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2022, Joe Biden responded in the affirmative to a journalist’s question asking him if Vladimir Putin was “a killer”.
These words were not regretted, a White House spokesperson then said. “He who says it is who is!” », said Mr. Putin according to remarks broadcast on Russian television.
In March 2022, Biden called Putin a “war criminal”, then a “butcher”, each time during brief and spontaneous exchanges with the press. The American president also said: “For the love of God, this man cannot stay in power.”
“A head of state must remain thoughtful,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov responded to the TASS agency.
Finally, in October 2023, Biden compared the Palestinian Islamist movement to Putin, described as a “tyrant”, emphasizing that “both want to completely destroy a neighboring democracy”. “Unacceptable” remarks for the Kremlin.
During his meeting with donors on Wednesday, the American president also attacked former President Donald Trump, who will in all probability be his opponent in November, and his reaction to the death in prison of Alexeï Navalny .
The Republican likened his problems with American justice to political persecution and compared his fate to that of the Russian opponent.
“If I had said something like that in front of you 10 or 15 years ago, you all would have thought I should be forcibly incarcerated,” Joe Biden said.
He promised to announce “major” sanctions against Russia on Friday in response to the death of Alexei Navalny.
Joe Biden had launched the same insult of “son of a bitch” at a journalist from Fox News, the favorite channel of conservatives, in January 2022, when he thought his microphone was off.
The AFP then translated the expression as “you bastard”.