US President Joe Biden called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a “crazy SOB” at a public fundraising event Wednesday in California.
“We have a crazy SOB like that guy Putin, and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is climate,” Biden said in a brief speech at the event in San Francisco that was attended by a small group of reporters.
Biden’s burst of strong language follows other occasions in which he has called the Russian president, who ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a “butcher” and a “war criminal.” In a hot mic slip in January 2022, Biden called a Fox News journalist a “son of a bitch.”
Earlier this week, Biden said the United States will announce a package of tough new sanctions Friday against Russia over the death in prison of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The US president said the Putin critic “bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence, and the — the — all the — all the bad things that the Putin government was doing.”
“In response, Putin had him poisoned. He had him arrested. He had him prosecuted for fabricated crimes. He sentenced him to prison. He was held in isolation. Even all that didn’t stop him from calling out Putin’s lies. Even in prison, he was a powerful voice of the truth, which is kind of amazing when you think about it,” he said in his White House remarks.
(With agency inputs)
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