US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he has “known” his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, “for over 40 years”, despite the fact that in the 1980s Russia's head of state acted as a KGB agent.
"I've known him for over 40 years. He's been worrying me for 40 years. He's not a decent man. He's a dictator and he's fighting to keep his country together and at the same time continue this assault,” said Joe Biden in an interview with ABC News journalist David Muir in France.
These statements quickly went viral and were associated with yet another gaffe by the 81-year-old president.
It should be noted that Putin was a spy for the KGB - the Soviet secret service agency - between 1975 and 1991, which makes it unlikely that Biden had any knowledge of what would become his Russian counterpart.
Putin's political career only took off in the early 1990s, when he worked as a top aide to the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, who had been his law professor at university.
In 1997, he joined the Kremlin as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB - successor to the KGB) and was soon appointed prime minister.
On the last day of 1999, the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, resigned and appointed Putin as interim president. He has been in power ever since, although he had to serve as prime minister between 2008 and 2012 because the Russian constitution forbade him from running for a third consecutive presidential term. He then returned to the head of state after winning the 2012 elections with more than 66% of the vote, amid accusations of electoral fraud.
According to the US press, Biden met Putin at least once when he was still US vice-president and Putin was prime minister of Russia. The two spoke again at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in June 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment