Kremlin says Biden ‘disrespectful’ of Putin and ‘whole world’ noticed Nato summit gaffes

The Kremlin said on Friday that the whole world had paid attention to Joe Biden’s verbal slips at a Nato summit and said the way the US president had spoken about Russian President Vladimir Putin was unacceptable.

The Kremlin was commenting after Biden on Thursday misspoke and introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”, before quickly correcting himself. In another slip, Biden mixed up the names of Kamala Harris, his vice-president, and his election opponent Donald Trump.

“We noticed that the whole world paid attention to what happened, and there can be no comment here (from us), but it is clear that these were slips of the tongue,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

“It is understandable that they probably received such a wide resonance given the context of the internal political discussions that we are now witnessing in the US, but it’s not our topic, it’s an internal US topic,” he said.

Biden’s stumbling performance in a debate with Trump last month and subsequent further slips have spurred intense debate about his mental fitness, at 81, to run for a second term, and led some Democrats to call for him to stand aside.