Joe Biden, then vice president, meeting with Vladimir V. Putin, then Russia's prime minister, in 2011. Photo / AP
The Kremlin described the US president's response to an interview question as "very bad," and recalled its ambassador to "analyse what needs to be done" about the countries' relations.
President Vladimir Putin dryly wished President Joe Biden "good health" on Thursday after the American leader assented to a description of his Russian counterpart as a "killer," and long-running tensions morphed into a furious exchange of trans-Atlantic taunts.
The previous evening, Russia took the rare step of recalling its ambassador to Washington after Biden's comments in a television interview, warning of the possibility of an "irreversible deterioration of relations." On Thursday, seated in a gilded chair on the seventh anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea, Putin all but called Biden a killer himself.
"When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: 'If you call someone names, that's really your name,'" Putin said, quoting a Russian schoolyard rhyme. "When we characterise other people, or even when we characterise other states, other people, it is always as though we are looking in the mirror."
Despite Biden's long-running criticism of Putin, some Russian analysts had voiced hope that the Kremlin could forge a productive working relationship with the new administration in Washington on areas of common interest. But Biden's combative stance in an interview with ABC News that was broadcast on Wednesday seemed to puncture those hopes, even as many of Putin's critics praised the American president's comments.
In the interview, when asked whether he thought Putin was a "killer," Biden responded: "Mmm hmm, I do." He further pledged that Putin was "going to pay" for Russian interference in the 2020 election, which was detailed in a US intelligence report this week.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced sanctions against Russian officials after declassifying an intelligence finding that Russia's domestic intelligence agency had orchestrated the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
"He said everything right," a top aide to Navalny, Leonid Volkov, posted on Twitter, referring to Biden's comments.
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters Thursday that Biden stood by his words. "He gave a direct answer to a direct question," she said.
To the Kremlin, however, Biden's interview offered a fresh opportunity to highlight its confrontation with the West for its home audience — a useful tool at a time of broadening domestic discontent over a stagnant economy and official corruption. Putin has painted Navalny and other Kremlin critics as Western agents on a mission to destroy Russia. And polls show that Russians remain far more likely to trust Putin on foreign policy than they do on domestic affairs.
"This is a watershed moment," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia's upper house of Parliament, wrote in a post on Facebook on Thursday in reference to Biden's interview. "Any expectations for the new US administration's new policy toward Russia have been written off by this boorish statement."
Kosachev warned that Russia would respond further, without specifying how, to Biden's comments "if explanations and apologies do not follow from the American side."
As if to underscore the anger in Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry said late Wednesday that it had summoned its envoy in Washington, Anatoly Antonov, to Moscow "in order to analyze what needs to be done in the context of relations with the United States." Russia last recalled its ambassador to Washington in 1998, to protest US airstrikes against Iraq.
"We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this," Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman, said in a statement.
On state television, news programs devoted extensive airtime to describing Biden as confused and out of touch, while politicians lined up to voice their anger and threaten a response.
Pyotr Tolstoy, the deputy chairman of the lower house of Parliament, thundered that "the only language" that Americans understand "is, unfortunately, the language of force." Another senior lawmaker, Andrei Turchak, described Biden's utterance as "a challenge to our entire nation."
"Conservative American journalists already suspected that Biden has dementia during the campaign," a reporter intoned in prime time on the state-run Channel 1. "Over time, these suspicions have only intensified."
Putin, in his comments on Thursday, picked up on the notion being pushed by the Kremlin's news media that Biden was somehow unwell.
"I would tell him: Be healthy," Putin said, in response to a question about Biden's comments posed by a woman in Crimea in a televised video conference on Thursday. "I wish him good health. I say this without irony, without joking."
Biden told ABC that he would continue to look for places "where it's in our mutual interest to work together," citing his agreement with Putin in January to extend a landmark arms control agreement. In his remarks Thursday, Putin countered that Russia would do so only on its own terms.
"We are going to work with them, but in those spheres in which we ourselves are interested, and on those terms that we think are beneficial for us," Putin said.
Addressing another flash point between Moscow and Washington, Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday said the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, between Russia and Germany, was a "bad deal," echoing Biden's resistance to the project.
The pipeline would reroute Russian natural gas exports to Europe under the Baltic Sea and bypass Ukraine. The project has been opposed by US lawmakers on the grounds that it gives Moscow a stronger hold on Europe's energy sector and stands to deny Kyiv billions of dollars in revenue from transit fees. The Trump administration also opposed the US$11 billion project, which is led by Russia's Gazprom.
Blinken said the United States, which has already placed sanctions on companies involved in building the pipeline, is monitoring which entities are still involved, and indicated they may be punished.
"The Department is tracking efforts to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline," Blinken said, "and is evaluating information regarding entities that appear to be involved."
An escalation of tensions with the West has often accompanied domestic crackdowns by the Kremlin, which claims that the United States is secretly backing opposition politicians in Russia in order to weaken Putin. For instance, Russia's internet regulator warned this week that it was preparing to block access to Twitter in the country entirely starting in one month, after restricting access to the American social network last week.
Some Western intelligence agencies have accused Putin, among other things, of ordering the assassination attempt of his most vocal domestic critic, Navalny, by a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia last year. Putin has denied playing any role in that near-deadly poisoning, quipping in December that if Russian agents had wanted to kill the opposition leader, "They would have probably finished the job."
The Russian government has also been linked to attacks on foreign soil, including the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018 and the shooting death of a former commander of Chechen separatists in Berlin the following year.
Putin signed a law in 2006 legalising targeted killings abroad — legislation that Russian lawmakers said at the time had been inspired by American and Israeli conduct.
Written by: Anton Troianovski
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