ST. PETERSBURG, June 7. /TASS/. US President Joe Biden should be the one to explain his claim about his relationship with Vladimir Putin going back 40 years, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS.
"You should ask Biden," the spokesman said when asked whether the US leader was mixing up his facts or if he did indeed meet Putin so long ago.
Earlier, in an interview with the ABC channel, Biden again painted the Russian president in an unfavorable light, curiously adding that he had known him for "more than 40 years."
When he was a senator for Delaware, Biden visited the USSR several times during the late 1970s. Putin, however, was in his early 30s at that time and served in the Committee for State Security (KGB) before being sent to work in East Germany in 1985, where he remained until the 1990s.
As heads of state, Putin and Biden last spoke by phone on February 12, 2022. Shortly before that, they spoke by videoconference. The only face-to-face meeting between Putin and Biden as heads of state took place in Geneva in June 2021.
At a meeting with leading international media on Wednesday, Putin mentioned a letter from Biden that, judging by the context, was received after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine.