Paris:
As US President Joe Biden prepares for his initially summit meeting with Vladimir Putin — who he has named “a killer” — we look at what his predecessors believed of the Russian president.
Clinton: Cold and difficult
US president Bill Clinton stated he hung up immediately after congratulating Putin on becoming acting Russian president in 1999 “thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together.”
Clinton, who had a warm rapport with Putin’s mentor Boris Yeltsin, located him cold but wrote in his memoirs that “Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skills and capacity… to manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life better than (the ailing) Yeltsin now could.”
Bush: Bromance to practically blows
George W. Bush privately named Putin “one cold dude” just before he was elected. But he was charmed at their initially meeting in Slovenia in 2001, famously saying he looked him in the eye to “get a sense of his soul”.
“He’s a man deeply committed to his country,” he added.
The deeply religious Bush was reportedly touched by a story Putin told him about how a cross his mother gave him was the only point to survive a fire at his dacha (nation property).
His vice-president Dick Cheney, even so, was unmoved saying when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”, referring to the Soviet secret service to which the Russian president when belonged.
But the relationship soured on each sides with Bush telling the Danish premier in 2006 that Putin was “not well-informed. It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.”
Putin stated he would not be lectured on democracy. “We would not want to have a democracy like in Iraq,” he told reporters in the course of a joint press conference with the US leader.
Bush also told British prime minister Tony Blair that he almost lost his cool in the course of a meeting with Putin, saying, “At one point the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America.”
When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 Bush confronted Putin straight at the Beijing Olympics, he wrote in his memoirs.
He told him he had warned him that the Georgian president was hot-blooded.
“I’m hot-blooded too,” Putin replied.
“No, Vladimir,” Bush retorted. “You’re cold-blooded.”
Obama: Feel the chill
Relations involving the US and Russia became their chilliest due to the fact the Cold War beneath America’s initially black president.
Obama did not attempt to hide his suspicion of the Russian leader. “I don’t have a bad personal relationship with Putin,” he told reporters in 2013.
“When we have conversations they’re candid, they’re blunt… and constructive. I know the press likes to focus on body language and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom…”
Recalling Bush’s popular phrase, his and Obama’s secretary of defence Robert M. Gates wrote in his memoir that when he initially looked into Putin’s eyes in 2007 “just as I expected I had seen a stone-cold killer.”
Trump: ‘I like Putin’
Donald Trump made so small work to disguise his admiration for the Russian leader that numerous in Washington wondered if he had been compromised by the Kremlin spy agencies Putin when led.
“I like Putin, he likes me,” Trump insisted last year, telling the journalist Bob Woodward the “tougher and meaner” strongmen leaders had been, “the better I get along with them”.
Trump stated immediately after a 2018 summit that he was more inclined to think Putin than the FBI more than Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he added.
Biden: ‘A killer’
President Joe Biden continued Obama’s challenging line with the Russian leader, warning practically as quickly as he walked into the White House that that “the days of the United States rolling over” in the face of Kremlin crimes had been more than.
Asked if he believed Putin was “a killer”, Biden says, “I do.”
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)