Russian President Valdimir Putin granted an interview to NBC yesterday in which he called Donald Trump a “colorful individual” and said he can work with President Joe Biden. Biden “is radically different from Trump because President Biden is a career man. He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in politics,” Putin said. “That’s a different kind of person, and it is my great hope that, yes, there are some advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any impulse-based movements on behalf of the sitting U.S. President,” reported TASS.
But NBC’s interviewer Keir Simmons was clearly intent on pinning Putin into a corner by drilling him on whether or not he is a “killer,” as Biden was tricked into saying in an interview a few months ago. Apparently, Simmons forgot about Barack Obama’s infamous Tuesday meetings, in which he personally decided who would be the next victim of his assassination-by-drone program.
“Over my tenure, I’ve gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretexts and reasons and of different caliber and fierceness, and none of it surprises me,” Putin said. The President dubbed the “killer” label as stemming from “Hollywood macho.”
Pressed further by Simmons, who mentioned by name some of the supposedly Putin opponents who have died in recent years, the Russian leader bristled. “Look, you know, I don’t want to come across as being rude, but this looks like some kind of indigestion, except that it’s verbal indigestion. You’ve mentioned many individuals who indeed suffered and perished at different points in time for various reasons, at the hands of different individuals,” he said. He later conveyed to NBC that one of those named, former media minister Mikhail Lesin, had died in a Washington, D.C. hotel, and that questions about his death should be asked of Washington. TASS reported that the death had been ruled an accident by the U.S. Attorney’s office. Far from his being an “opponent,” Putin commented, “I regret to this day that he is not with us. In my opinion, he is a very decent, a very good person.”
Putin also dismissed as “nonsense” a Washington Post report that Russia was preparing to offer Iran an advanced satellite system that would enable Tehran to track military targets, including the remaining U.S. troops in Iraq. “It’s just fake news,” he said. “At the very least, I don’t know anything about this kind of thing. Those who are speaking about it probably will, maybe know more about it. It’s just nonsense, garbage.”
On former President Donald Trump Putin said: “Well even now, I believe that former U.S. President Mr. Trump is an extraordinary individual, talented individual, otherwise he would not have become U.S. President. He is a colorful individual. You may like him or not. And, but he didn’t come from the U.S. establishment, he had not been part of big time politics before, and some like it, some don’t like it, but that is a fact.”
As for U.S.-Russian relations, Putin said,"We have a bilateral relationship that has deteriorated to its lowest point in recent years.”
Additional portions of the interview are to be aired on the Today show on June 14 and “Nightly News with Lester Holt” and on MSNBC.
