Biden’s verbal slips at NATO summit caught world attention, Moscow says

The Kremlin said on Friday that the whole world had paid attention to Joe Biden’s verbal slips at a NATO summit and said the way the U.S. president had spoken about Russian President Vladimir Putin was unacceptable.

The Kremlin was commenting after Biden on Thursday misspoke and introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin,” before quickly correcting himself. In another slip, Biden mixed up the names of Kamala Harris, his vice-president, and his election opponent Donald Trump.

“We noticed that the whole world paid attention to what happened, and there can be no comment here (from us), but it is clear that these were slips of the tongue,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“It is understandable that they probably received such a wide resonance given the context of the internal political discussions that we are now witnessing in the US, but it’s not our topic, it’s an internal U.S. topic,” he said.

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Biden’s stumbling performance in a debate with Trump last month and subsequent further slips have spurred intense debate about his mental fitness, at 81, to run for a second term, and led some Democrats to call for him to stand aside.

Peskov said it was for U.S. voters, not Russia, to determine the U.S. presidential candidates’ prospects.

But he added that the Kremlin had taken note of what it called disrespectful comments Biden had made about Putin.

He did not say what those comments were, but Biden referred to Putin at the NATO summit as “a murderous madman.”

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“We continue to consider it absolutely unacceptable and impermissible behavior for a head of state to make such disrespectful remarks about other heads of state. I am referring to his remarks about President Putin,” Peskov said.

“This is unacceptable to us, and we don’t think it in any way makes an American head of state look good. This is something that we pay direct attention to and something that is absolutely unacceptable to us.”

The Kremlin has accused Biden in the past of making unseemly comments about Putin. Biden assented in 2021 to a TV interviewer’s description of Putin as “a killer,” and in February this year called the Kremlin leader a “crazy SOB.”

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov Writing by Andrew Osborn and Mark TrevelyanEditing by Andrew Osborn)