'Takes one to know one': Putin-Biden spat escalates after 'killer' accusation
Russian relations with the US have entered a new post-Trump period of smouldering hostility after Vladimir Putin shrugged off accusations from Joe Biden that he was a “killer”, saying: “It takes one to know one.”
The Russian president responded in characteristically icy fashion to Biden’s remark, which followed an assessment by US intelligence agencies that Moscow was continuing to meddle in American democracy and had tried to help Donald Trump win last year’s US election.
Putin flipped the accusation back on his US counterpart in an interview to mark the seventh anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea: “I remember in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard, we used to say: it takes one to know one,” he told state TV. “That’s not … just a children’s saying or joke. We always see our own traits in other people and think they are like how we really are. And as a result we assess [a person’s] activities and give assessments.”
Putin then said he would tell Biden by way of reply: “I wish you health.” His comments were made “without any irony or joke”, he added impassively.
Later in the day, on the sidelines of an event, Putin invited Biden to virtual talks, suggesting the conversation take place on Friday or Monday.
The exchanges mark a definitive breach with the Trump administration, which refused to call out Moscow despite a string of poisonings seemingly authorised by the Russian state. They include the novichok attacks on Sergei Skripal in 2018 and on Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, last summer.
Navalny, Putin’s most formidable adversary, is in a penal colony after flying back from Germany to Moscow in January where he was arrested. Biden has signalled that Washington will no longer “roll over” in the face of Russian aggression, and he is preparing yet-to-be-revealed countermeasures. There will be a “price to pay”, Biden said.
On Wednesday the Kremlin recalled its ambassador to Washington in protest, for the first time in more than two decades. Russian officials launched their own rhetorical counter-blast, describing the US president as senile, irredeemably hostile and a world-class hypocrite.
“These are very bad statements from the president of the United States,” the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. “He clearly does not want to improve ties and we will have to proceed from that understanding.”
Konstantin Kosachev, the deputy chair of the Russian parliament’s upper house, said Moscow would probably take further steps “if the American side does not offer an explanation or apology”.
Kosachev said Biden’s comments, made in a TV interview on Wednesday, “were not acceptable under any circumstances” and had sent any hopes of an improvement of relations under the new administration “down the drain”.
Earlier Andrei Turchak, a senior politician in the ruling United Russia party, said Biden’s interview was “a triumph of US political insanity and oldage dementia of their leader”.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of the Russian parliament, said the “hysterical” US leader had “insulted the citizens of our country”.
But there was no attempt by Moscow to engage with the substance of US accusations. A report this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the Kremlin ran a multi-faceted influence operation in 2020 in support of Trump.
It included spreading misleading information about Biden via Russian proxies in Ukraine and feeding it to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Russia did not seek to change voter tallies but did use its notorious troll factory to disparage the Democrats and to amplify Trump’s false claim that he won November’s election.
Last year Putin praised Biden as an “experienced” politician and said he would be willing to work with any US administration to improve ties between Moscow and Washington. His comments appeared to come after the Kremlin privately concluded that Trump would probably lose.
In their first call after the election, Biden told Putin he would take a significantly tougher public line on Moscow than his supine predecessor. The US administration is still seeking to determine the damage done by a devastating cyber-attack last year against federal bodies, carried out by hackers from Russia’s GRU military spy agency.
Biden has previously said he does not believe Putin has a soul, an assessment that he repeated in Wednesday’s ABC interview. He insisted, however, that there were areas where the coun
tries had a “mutual interest to work together”, citing the recent bilateral renewal of the Start treaty limiting nuclear weapons.
As Moscow’s ambassador returned for consultations, the foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova admitted that relations “are in a difficult state, which Washington has brought to a dead end in recent years”.
The White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said: “The Russians will be held accountable for the actions they have taken.”
It is now evident that Biden does not intend to repeat the doomed effort by the Obama administration to “reset” relations with Moscow. Other areas of disagreement include the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s support for the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war.
The question of whether Putin is a killer has yet to be conclusively resolved. In 2016, however, a judge in the UK concluded that the Russian president had “probably” approved the 2006 assassination of the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died after drinking poisoned tea.