President Joe Biden might’ve called Vladimir Putin a “crazy SOB,” but the Russian leader doesn’t appear to be that mad about it.
“It’s not like he could say ‘Good job, Volodya, thank you for the helping hand,'” Putin told Russia-1 host Pavel Zarubin in an interview on Thursday, per a translation shared by state-owned media outlet RT.
“We understand what is going on there, in terms of internal politics,” Putin continued.
Biden had called Putin the name during a fundraiser in California on Wednesday night, per The New York Times.
“We have a crazy SOB like that guy Putin, and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict,” Biden told donors.
But Putin appeared to take Biden’s remarks in stride. Biden’s reaction, Putin said, was likely a response to an interview he’d given to Zarubin last week.
Putin had told Zarubin on February 14 that he would prefer a second Biden term instead of having Donald Trump back in the White House. Putin called Biden a “politician of the old formation” who is “more experienced, more predictable.”
“Judging by what he said, I was absolutely right. That’s the appropriate reaction to what I said,” Putin told Zarubin on Thursday, maintaining that Biden was still his preferred presidential candidate.
The Biden administration has vehemently opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The US has given Ukraine more than $44 billion in military assistance since the war began in February 2022.
Biden, for his part, placed the blame squarely on Putin after Russia announced that the famed political dissident Alexey Navalny had died in prison on February 16.
“Russian authorities are going to tell their own story. But make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Biden told journalists on the same day.
Representatives for Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
