New verbal attack fired Joe Biden at Vladimir Putin.
“We have a crazy son of a son (SOB) in front of us, like others, as a result of which we are forced to constantly worry about the possibility of a nuclear conflict, at a time when the existential threat to humanity is the climate,” he said characteristically US president at a campaign rally in San Francisco, provoking a strong reaction from Moscow.
“The use of this kind of language against a head of state by the president of the United States is unlikely to have an effect on our own president. However, it is something that exposes and belittles those who use such vocabulary. He talks like a Hollywood cowboy,” replied Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Putin himself, however, when asked about this statement by state television, smiled sarcastically and provocatively repeated that as the leader of Russia he prefers to have Biden as his president.
It is not the first time that the US president chooses harsh characterizations for his Russian counterpart. In 2021, and shortly after his inauguration, he had called him a “murderer”, while in a speech in Warsaw in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he had said that Putin “cannot remain in power”. And last week, as soon as the death of Alexei Navalny became known, he directly expressed the opinion that this “was a consequence of the actions of Putin and his thugs”.
In his speech yesterday, Biden also aimed his arrows at Donald Trump, strongly criticizing him for comparing himself and the trials pending against him to the prosecution of Navalny. “If I stood here in front of you and said things like this 10-15 years ago, you’d all think I should be locked up in an insane asylum,” he said.
For his part, Putin’s close ally and former president and prime minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev claimed that the only real threat to the world comes from “some old creatures like Biden”, whom he even accused of being “ready to start a war with Russia”.
At the same time, he did not fail to launch new threats, hinting that his country might try to occupy much more than the 18%-20% of Ukraine it now controls. “Where should we stop? I do not know. Will it be in Kyiv? Yes, it should probably be in Kiev.
And if not now, then probably after some time, maybe in some other phase of this conflict,” said the current vice president of the national security council.
A few days before the two-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the spokesman for the Ukrainian air force gave a kind of reckoning.
As he pointed out, during this time Russia has launched more than 8,000 missiles of all types and 4,630 drones against Ukraine and at various targets – mainly military installations, energy infrastructure, industrial units and ports.
Of these, the air defense managed to shoot down hundreds of missiles and 3,605 drones, with the help of both the systems it has received from the West (among them the American Patriots) and small and flexible teams that have undertaken their early detection.
A new element related to the effectiveness of Western sanctions against Moscow is also revealing.
Specifically, according to a report by B4Ukraine – an “umbrella” of more than 80 organizations -, over the course of these two years, Russia has obtained $653 billion from oil and gas sales, exploiting loopholes in the announced measures as well as a “shadow fleet” of tankers plying the seas of the world.
It is, as is clear, money that for the most part went to finance Putin’s war machine – at a time when US aid has been frozen for about a year, while Germany also rejected Kiev’s supply request yesterday long-range Taurus missiles.
