Kremlin officials delivered a sly blow to U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday, responding to his “personal insult” of Vladimir Putin by casting aspersions on his cognitive ability.
“We do hear and see statements addressed to President Putin that in fact constitute a personal insult,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in response to President Biden branding the Russian leader a “murderous dictator, a pure thug… waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine” during the Annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon in the U.S. capital.
The American also said of his Russian counterpart “I think he is a war criminal” in comments to a journalist at the event.
“Bearing in mind Mr Biden’s irritability, fatigue and forgetfulness, which eventually results in aggressive statements, we will possibly prefer to refrain from making any strong comments so as not to trigger more aggression,” Peskov jabbed at Biden, leaning into concerns around the 79-year-old’s mental acuity in the United States, in comments reported by Russian state-owned news agency TASS.
The intensification in President Biden’s rhetoric against President Putin personally follows a recent address to the U.S. Congress by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
President Zelensky had urged the American legislature to “Remember Pearl Harbor” when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Hawaii, and to “Remember September 11. A terrible day in 2001 when people tried to turn your cities into battlefields. When innocent people were attacked from the air. No one expected it. You couldn’t stop it. Our country experiences the same every day.”
The Ukrainian leader went on to urge the U.S. to establish a so-called “no-fly zone” over his country — a request the Biden administration has so far refused, given it would be tantamount to starting an air war with Russia — or to supply him with warplanes.
“We know they exist and you have them. They are not in Ukrainian skies,” he chided, likely in reference to an embarrassing episode in which U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared to try and bounce NATO ally Poland into donating its MiG-29s to Ukraine, only for the Biden administration to quickly reject a Polish offer to transfer the jets to American custody free of charge so they could arrange the risky transfer.