Moscow, Feb 15 (EFE).- Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that he prefers Joe Biden over Donald Trump as president of the United States.
The US will hold presidential elections in November, with Trump expected to be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate to take on Biden at the polls.
Putin made the remarks in an interview on Wednesday night on Russian public television.
“Biden (…) is a more experienced, predictable person, a politician of the old school,” the Kremlin chief told Pavel Zarubin, a well-known Russian TV presenter.
“But we will work with any US leader in whom the American people place their trust,” Putin stressed.
Putin made the comments after giving an interview last week to conservative US broadcaster Tucker Carlson, widely seen as a standard-bearer of Trump’s cause.
The Russian leader defended Biden over speculation about his health and mental capacities, and recalled that when they last met in June 2021 in Geneva “they were already saying that he was unfit” for office.
“I didn’t see any of that. Well, yes, he looked at his paper and, to be honest, I looked at mine. And the fact that on one occasion when he got out of the helicopter he hit his head, what’s the matter, we don’t hit our heads? He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone,” Putin said.
He linked the criticism to the fact that “in the United States the domestic political campaign, the election campaign is gaining momentum.”
“This is acquiring more and more acute forms. In my opinion it is not right for us to interfere in that process,” said Putin, who a few weeks ago accused Biden of winning the 2020 election fraudulently through mail-in ballot manipulation.
Russia was found by US authorities to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election which brought Trump to the White House.
The Russian leader stressed that Moscow should focus not on the health of his US counterpart, but on the Biden istration’s “political stance”, which he said was “pernicious and wrong.”
Alluding to fears of Trump’s return to the White House, Putin stressed that the former US president “was always considered a politician on the fringes of the system.” EFE
mos/ks
