Vladimir Putin has said he would prefer a Joe Biden presidency to a Donald Trump one and mocked the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson for a “lack of sharp questions” during their interview at the Kremlin last week.
Asked by a Russian state journalist on Wednesday to choose between Biden and Trump, Putin said without hesitation that the current US president was “more experienced, predictable, an old-school politician”, but added: “We will work with any US president who the American people have confidence in.”
It was the first time Putin had spoken about the forthcoming US presidential elections, at a time when Kyiv waits anxiously to see if the US House of Representatives will approve a critical wartime aid package for Ukraine.
The Russian president also dismissed worries over Biden’s age and mental acuity, saying he had not noticed any issues with his American counterpart during a meeting in 2021.
“Even then [three years ago], people were saying that he was incompetent, but I did not see anything of this sort,” he said. “Yes, he kept looking at his papers, but to be honest I kept doing the same. So there was nothing peculiar.”
The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said: “I think Mr Putin knows very well what this administration has been doing to counter Russia’s malign influence around the world … Mr Putin should just stay out of our elections.”
Putin’s comments came a day after Biden criticised Trump for “bowing down for a Russian dictator”.
Earlier this week, Trump said in a rally with his supporters that he would encourage Russia to invade countries that did not meet their Nato obligations, sending shockwaves through the ranks of European leaders.
Critics of Trump accuse the former president of a predisposition to be sympathetic to Putin. His years in office have been tainted by a US intelligence report that said Russia had interfered in the 2016 White House race to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
Trump has recently been lobbying Republican lawmakers to vote against the Senate-approved $95.34bn military aid package.
In contrast, Biden has been a longtime critic of Putin, calling him a “killer”, even before the invasion of Ukraine. Under his administration, the US has provided roughly half of all the foreign military assistance to Ukraine’s arsenal since the start of the war.
Putin described US support for Ukraine as “harmful and mistaken” and praised Trump for casting a shadow over Nato’s long-term future.
Russia’s cautious backing of the current US president, a fierce critic of the Putin regime for years, is likely to be an attempt by Putin to sow chaos into the already polarised US elections. Putin’s guarded endorsement is unlikely to be met with cheers by the Biden camp, given the Russian president’s pariah status in the west.
Commenting on Putin’s remarks at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said that Putin had given him “a great compliment, actually”.
“He just said that he would much rather have Joe Biden as president than Trump.”
In the same interview on Russian state TV on Wednesday, Putin also said he did not get “much pleasure” from last week’s two-hour interview with the conservative presenter Carlson, because the questions had not been sharp enough.
“To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions. I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way,” Putin said in comments broadcast on Wednesday.
Carlson, who is known for his anti-Ukraine stance, was criticised by many in the west for the lack of tough questions in the interview, much of which was taken up by Putin lecturing the conservative host on his distorted views of Russian and Ukrainian history and recycling some of his well-trodden grievances meant to justify the war in Ukraine.
Putin last gave an interview to western media in 2021, when he spoke with a reporter for CNBC. He has largely ceased speaking to independent media, both Russian and international, since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since 2021, he has only given interviews to Russian, Kazakh and Chinese media.
Putin said that Carlson had “tried to interrupt me several times” but praised the conservative journalist, who is close to Trump, for his “patience” when listening to his “long speeches, especially those related to history”.
