President Biden claimed Thursday that he has known Vladimir Putin for “more than 40 years,” despite the Russian president’s having served as a covert KGB agent throughout the 1980s.
“I’ve known him for over 40 years. For 40 years, he’s worried me. He’s not a good human being,” Biden, 81, told ABC News host David Muir during an interview at the Normandy American Cemetery in France to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
Putin served as a Soviet intelligence officer from 1975 to 1991, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel after serving in his hometown of St. Petersburg and in East Germany, so it is highly unlikely that Biden knew about the existence of future US adversaries as early as he claims.
Putin later served as an aide to St. Petersburg’s then-mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and as deputy mayor from 1991 to 1996, before serving as a Kremlin official and head of the Federal Security Service, which succeeded the KGB after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Parents.
“Until he was selected in August [1999] “Putin was never a public figure when then-President Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister,” The Washington Post reported. report January 2000.
Biden has met with Putin at least once, when the former was U.S. vice president and the latter was Russian prime minister, and they met again at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in June 2021.
The Washington Post has reached out to the White House for comment.
Biden stressed in the interview on Thursday that recent authorization for U.S. military weapons in Ukraine only allows for attacks inside the Russian-occupied Kharkiv region.
“It is authorized for use near the border when it is used on the other side of the border to strike specific targets in Ukraine,” the president said. “We do not authorize attacks 200 miles into Russia, and we do not authorize attacks on Moscow or the Kremlin.”
Putin said Wednesday that U.S. supplies of weapons to Ukraine and approval of their use was “direct participation in the war against the Russian Federation” and that the Kremlin “reserves the right to take similar action,” at one point referring to Ukraine’s nuclear capabilities.
“He’s a dictator, and he’s struggling to hold his country together while he continues this attack,” Biden told Muir on Thursday. “We’re not talking about giving Russia weapons to attack Moscow or the Kremlin across the border, where they’re under intense attack with conventional weapons that they’re using to invade Ukraine and kill Ukrainians.”
In remarks early Thursday, Biden said “tyrants” were putting the trans-Atlantic NATO alliance “at greater risk than at any time since World War II” and vowed that the US and Europe “will not bow down.”
“We cannot bow down to tyrants – it is completely unthinkable. If we did, freedom would be suppressed and the whole of Europe would be threatened,” he said.
The president is scheduled to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later Thursday as the United States continues to provide aid and support to Ukraine’s beleaguered war effort more than two years after the Feb. 24, 2022, Russian incursion.
