Joe Biden has shown he is “a pro-Russian candidate being controlled by the Kremlin,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman joked on Friday, after the U.S. president misspoke and introduced Ukraine’s leader as “President Putin” before correcting himself.
Video of the gaffe at a NATO summit in Washington on Thursday featured prominently on news bulletins in Russia, where state TV commentators have long depicted Biden, 81, as a senile old man who risks stumbling into World War Three unlike Putin, 71, whom they portray as a strategic genius.
Biden mixing up the names of his Republican rival Donald Trump with that of Kamala Harris, his vice-president, was also given coverage.
Olga Skabeyeva, a pro-Kremlin TV commentator, posted a clip of Biden’s Putin name fumble on her social media feed with a crying with laughter emoji.
“The show from Joe goes on!,” she wrote separately beneath footage of the Trump/Harris name mix-up.
Biden’s gaffes come at a moment when he is facing calls from some fellow Democrats to abandon his re-election bid. The president has insisted he is staying in the race and is the best placed to beat Trump in the November election.
The Kremlin said Biden’s errors had been widely noticed.
“We noticed that the whole world paid attention to what happened… It’s clear that these were slips of the tongue,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
He said Biden’s gaffes were “an internal U.S. topic” but that the Kremlin had also noted his disrespectful comments about Putin, whom the U.S. leader referred to as “a murderous madman”.
“This is unacceptable to us, and we don’t think it in any way makes an American head of state look good,” said Peskov.
But it was Biden’s verbal slips that dominated media coverage and commentary inside Russia.
Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, said anyone could make a mistake, but that Biden seemed to make one every day because he was “retarded”.
Maria Zakharova, Russia’s high-profile Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, published a sarcastic commentary that used Biden’s error in introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as “President Putin” to mock what
Moscow says are false U.S. allegations it has meddled in U.S. politics.
By Agencies.
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