He loves to keep other leaders waiting (Merkel holds the record with four and a half hours Queen Elizabeth II got off lightly with just 14 minutes). Above all, Putin wishes to be seen as a peer of Biden, Xi Jinping and Angela Merkel. Putin is famously touchy not only about his own personal stature but about Russia’s. So when Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, insisted on 30 March that ‘neither Putin, nor anyone else from the Russian administration, will allow the US or other nations to talk to us from a position of power’, his words must have rung a little hollow in the White House. The only ways the Kremlin has managed to throw its weight around since the collapse of the Soviet Union have been by invading much weaker neighbors like Georgia and Ukraine deploying its military in places the West has declined to get involved in, like Syria and the Central African Republic and engaging in illegal (the diplomatic term is ‘asymmetric’) warfare fought by hackers, trolls and poisoners. Unlike the USSR, Putin’s Russia has no regional or international allies to speak of, and wields little ideological soft power. The US’s $700 billion defense budget alone would account for half of Russia’s GDP.īiden’s dislike of Putin is as much personal as ideological Per capita, it’s 61st, in the neighborhood of Bulgaria and Grenada. Russia’s economy is nominally the 11th largest in the world, between South Korea’s and Brazil’s. But in every other sense Russia remains, as Henry Kissinger put it, ‘Upper Volta with nuclear missiles’. Yes, Putin commands the only nuclear arsenal in the world that can match America’s. There must have been laughter in the Kremlin the next day when Biden slipped not once but thrice clambering up the stairs to Air Force One.

Given that Biden had just publicly accused Putin of being a poisoner, this came across as the slightly sinister ‘mind your step’ valediction of a mafia boss. He also wished Biden ‘the best of health’. ‘When I was a kid, when we were arguing with each other in the playground, we used to say, “What you say is what you are,”’ said Putin. Putin’s response to the ‘killer’ charge was effectively to call Biden a killer himself. Whether Putin understands Biden is less clear. Donald Trump called him ‘extremely strong and powerful’. Bush found Putin ‘very straightforward and trustworthy’ after looking into his eyes and getting ‘a sense of his soul’. Maybe Biden does understand Putin, though. Putin smiled and replied, ‘We understand one another.’ At least that’s what happened if you believe Joe Biden. ‘I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’ the vice president said. The last time Joe visited Vladimir in the Kremlin was back in 2011, when Biden was VP and Prime Minister Putin his counterpart, having temporarily swapped positions with Dmitry Medvedev. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have been taking potshots at each other for at least a decade. Arch-Russiagaters in the US get to write off Donald Trump’s election as a Kremlin plot rather than try to understand it as a popular revolt against the Washington establishment. America’s insistence that Russia is interfering with her democracy and that her spies are everywhere gives Putin a wonderful domestic boost to his status as international evil genius and all-powerful spymaster. The old thrill may be long gone, but both former partners still manage to kick up a few sparks from the old Cold War ashes. And many Americans still secretly love to have a reliable foreign baddie to blame when their democracy wobbles. Russia is still dependent on her ex’s power and glamour to prove her continued status in the world. Russia and the United States are like an old divorced couple, still bickering 40 years after their stormy superpower marriage broke up. ‘Other than being crazy enough to press a button, there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests.’ No one is close,’ Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers in Kiev in 2014. ‘We no longer think in Cold War terms, for several reasons. Once a deadly serious enemy whose rivalry threatened to destroy life on the planet, Russia’s diminished status means that, these days, there’s little left to the grand old conflict except mere mudslinging. Today? Biden can insult Putin with impunity because he believes that Russia is, quite simply, no longer important or dangerous. Once, that would have been fighting talk. Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos.

Upper volta with rockets