Russia has blasted the "outrageous" remarks of US Vice President Kamala Harris when talking about President Vladimir Putin during a Howard Stern interview aired live on SiriusXM radio.
In the Tuesday show she called Putin a "murderous dictator". If she's elected the remarks are unlikely to ever be forgotten by the Russian side, making the possibility of improved diplomacy extremely difficult, and perhaps that's the point.
The Russian Embassy in Washington has issued official statement Wednesday: "The recent unacceptable statements made by US Vice-President Kamala Harris towards Russian President Vladimir Putin are outrageous. However, we have to admit that such a boorish language has become a habit among the current so-called American statesmen," it reads.
"It only shows the frustration and impotence of the ruling circles in Washington. Due to their inability to deal with the Russian Federation and inflicting 'a strategic defeat,' their speech apparatus channels anger and offensive rhetoric," the embassy continued.
"The US authorities should come to terms with the fact that Russia is pursuing a policy based on its national interests. Such US escapades insult the entire Russian people, who demonstrate unwavering unity around the leader of our country," the statement underscored.
Harris during the Stern interview was responding to questions raised about journalist Bob Woodward's new book, which bizarrely alleges that during the height of the Covid pandemic then President Trump secretly sent coronavirus tests to Putin as a gesture of good will.
This action, even if true (the Trump campaign has slammed it as a falsehood), hardly rises to the level of a national scandal. But of course, the Democrats are trying to spin the allegations, or what essentially appears meager Trump efforts to improve diplomacy with Moscow, into big headlines.
"He admires strongmen, and he gets played by them because he thinks that they’re his friends," Harris said. "And they are manipulating him full time."
"[This is] just the most recent, stark example of who Donald Trump is," Harris continued in response to the Woodward book. "People were dying by the hundreds. Everybody was scrambling to get these kits, the COVID test kits. Couldn’t get them, couldn’t get them anywhere.
But that's when she said in reference to Putin, "And this guy who was president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator, for his personal use."
