Day: February 22, 2024

The Kremlin has accused Joe Biden of debasing himself and disgracing his country after the US president called Vladimir Putin a “crazy SOB” during a fundraiser in San Francisco.

Biden was talking about the climate crisis on Wednesday when he said: “We have a crazy SOB like Putin and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is climate.”

Biden has previously called others a “son of a bitch”. In January 2022, he was caught on a hot mic using the same term of abuse about a Fox News White House reporter.

The Kremlin said Biden’s comments were a “disgrace” for the United States.

“The use of such language against the head of another state by the president of the United States is unlikely to infringe on our president, President Putin,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “But it debases those who use such vocabulary.”

The remarks were “probably some kind of attempt to look like a Hollywood cowboy”, Peskov added.

The US president has previously called Putin a killer, a pure thug, a war criminal and a butcher. Shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden said the Russian president “cannot stay in power”.

Meanwhile, the US said it was preparing “major sanctions” against Moscow in response to Alexei Navalny’s death.

Speaking to donors at a private San Francisco home on Wednesday as part of a three-day trip through California to raise money for his 2024 re-election campaign, Biden also said he was astounded by recent comments made by his likely Republican challenger.

Donald Trump compared the suspicious prison death of Russian opposition leader Navalny to his own legal troubles in the US. Trump was fined $350m after a New York judge found he lied for years about his wealth on financial statements in his companies. Trump said the ruling was a form of “communism or fascism”.

“Some of the things that this fellow’s been saying, like he’s comparing himself to Navalny and saying that – because our country’s become a communist country, he was persecuted, just like Navalny was persecuted. I don’t know where the hell this comes from,” Biden said.

“I mean, if I stood here 10, 15 years ago and said any of this, you’d all think I should be committed,” he said. “It astounds me.”

Biden has a tendency to go off script during election fundraisers and in recent months has made apparently unplanned remarks about the Chinese president, the Republican party and US ally Israel for its bombing of the Gaza Strip.

Biden’s verbal attacks against Putin have sharply intensified at the White House and on the campaign trail. Last week, the US president blamed Putin and “his thugs” for the death of opposition leader Navalny.

“We don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Nalvany was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,” Biden said at the White House after Russian prison officials announced that Navalny had died.

The Kremlin has denied involvement in Navalny’s death and said western claims that Putin was responsible are unacceptable.

Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report