Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his support for Vice President Kamala Harris at a press conference on Thursday, saying he prefers her as the next U.S. president because he wants the Biden administration to continue, and because she “laughs so expressively and infectiously.”
Putin made his remarks, with tongue in cheek, at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He was ostensibly mocking the very idea Russia has a preference in the U.S. election, or would interfere in American politics.
“I told you our favorite, if you can call it that, was the current President Mr. Biden. He was removed from the race, but he recommended all his supporters to support Ms. Harris. So we will do the same. We will support her,” Putin said.
“She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that everything is fine with her,” he said.
Putin said he would prefer not to see former president Donald Trump return to the White House because he “introduced such a number of restrictions and sanctions against Russia that no president has ever introduced before.”
“If Ms. Harris is doing well, then maybe she will refrain from actions of this kind,” he suggested.
“Ultimately, the choice is up to the American people, and we will respect that choice. As for the favorites, it is not up to us to determine that. It is, after all, the choice of the American people,” he added.
U.S. media outlets like Bloomberg News rushed to assure their readers Putin really doesn’t favor Harris for president:
Putin’s comments effectively amounted to presidential trolling a day after the Biden administration announced that Russia—backed entities had pursued a yearslong operation to meddle in the US election and broadly boost the Kremlin’s interests. The FBI cited internal planning documents from one of the entities saying it was in Russia’s interest to ensure that Donald Trump or another Republican candidate won the White House.
But they also reflect the Kremlin’s view that, with relations at their lowest in decades over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there’s little prospect for improvement whoever wins the US presidency. Putin said Biden was “predictable” when he told state television in February that he’d prefer him over Trump in the White House.
Newsweek fired up its Wayback Machine and frantically twisted the dials to July to dredge up a comment from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peksov that suggested Russia might not be so thrilled to see Harris take over the Oval Office.
Amusingly, what Peksov was actually saying was that Harris is such a nonentity, with such an inert record of accomplishments as vice president, that her Russia policy as president would be difficult to predict.
“At the moment, we cannot assess the potential candidacy of Ms. Harris from the point of view of our bilateral relations because, so far, her contribution to our bilateral relations has not been noticed,” Peskov said in July.
“There were statements that were replete with rhetoric quite unfriendly toward our country, but her actions in relations to bilateral relations come under neither a plus nor a minus sign,” he said.
Reuters made a point of noting that both Putin and the moderator of the Eastern Economic Forum were “smiling” when he talked about Harris.
