Western leaders who mocked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propensity to be photographed topless have been met with the riposte they would look “disgusting” if they tried to emulate his bare-torso bravado.
AP reports Putin hit back during a visit to Turkmenistan early Thursday when asked about Western leaders taunting him at the G7 summit.
As they sat down for talks, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson jested G7 leaders could go topless to flex their muscles amid Russia-West tensions over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine, as Breitbart News reported.
Canada’s leader Justin Trudeau suggested they wait for the official picture before disrobing but then Johnson quipped “We have to show that we’re tougher than Putin” and the japes kept rolling.
“We’re going to get the bare-chested horseback riding display,” Trudeau said, referring to Putin’s infamous 2009 photo-op of himself riding shirtless on a horse and fishing bare-chested.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is pictured with a horse during his vacation outside the town of Kyzyl in Southern Siberia on August 3, 2009. (ALEXEY DRUZHININ/RIA NOVOSTI/AFP via Getty)
Putin fishes in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia. The picture taken between August 1 and 3, 2017. (ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
Putin plunges topless into the icy waters of lake Seliger during the celebration of the Epiphany holiday in Russia’s Tver region early on January 19, 2018. (ALEXEY DRUZHININ/AFP via Getty Images)
“Horseback riding is the best,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, without apparently weighing in on the clothing issue itself.
Johnson interjected, “We’ve got to show them our pecs.”
Speaking to reporters, the AP report outlines Putin retorted that, unlike him, Western leaders abuse alcohol and don’t do sports, so their bodies are not as trimly taut as his.
“I don’t know how they wanted to get undressed, above or below the waist,” he said. “But I think it would be a disgusting sight in any case.”
He noted that to look good “it’s necessary to stop abusing alcohol and other bad habits, do physical exercise and take part in sports.”
Putin has always seen himself as a man of action as opposed to the indolent westerners he professes to despise.
Putin attends a friendly ice hockey match on December29, 2021, in Saint Petersburg , Russia. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty)
In 2015, Putin burnished his action man image by diving down in a mini-submarine to explore a shipwreck off the coast of the Crimea peninsula (AFP/Getty)
In 2015, he joined a mini-submarine to explore a shipwreck off the coast of the Crimea peninsula that Moscow seized from Ukraine the year before.
Putin — wearing a beige pantsuit — plunged down to a depth of 83 metres seated alongside the pilot in the glass-bubble cabin of the Dutch-made vessel.