So who, exactly, is Vladimir Putin going to eat for lunch?
At the US presidential debate, one of the foreign policy topics the candidates hit on was a perennial topic for presidential debates in recent times: who really is going to be Vladimir Putin’s ”puppet?” Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?
Putin, Harris told Trump in heated exchange, was a “dictator who would eat you for lunch.” Russia’s leader, she said, “would be sitting in Kyiv right now with his eyes on the rest of Europe” if Trump was president. Trump, for his part, groused that Putin actually loves Harris: “Putin endorsed her last week. Said I hope she wins. And I think he meant it.”
Russia, for its part, really didn’t love it.
“We still hope that they will leave our president alone,” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a press briefing on Wednesday.
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How would Harris and Trump end Russia’s war with Ukraine?
The debate back-and-forth about Putin was part of discussion about Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and U.S. national security interests.
Trump repeated his claim that he knew the best way to get both sides to reach a war-ending deal. He didn’t say how he’d help facilitate that. Trump also didn’t say whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war, while Harris spoke about Ukraine’s “righteous defense.”
For Harris, bringing up Putin was aimed at touting her foreign policy credentials − and to make an appeal to voters in Pennsylvania, a state she needs to win in order to win the presidency. When riffing about how she believes Putin would be sitting in Kyiv if Trump was in charge, Harris noted that it would allow the Russian dictator to have an entry into Poland. “And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator,” she said.
Why are you so negative?
Russia seemed unimpressed with the discussion.
“We are not happy about this,” Peskov said during the press briefing.The U.S., he said, “as a whole, no matter which party the candidates come from, retains a negative and unfriendly attitude toward our country. The surname Putin is used as an instrument in the internal political tug-of-war in the United States.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova meanwhile described the debate as like watching two famous boxers fighting on the Titanic, the doomed British ocean liner. “At the end people ask, ‘Who won?’ Does it matter? This is the Titanic. In 15 minutes they’ll hit the iceberg,” she told Russian-state-owned Sputnik Radio.
Earlier this month, Putin appeared to joke that his country favors Harris in the November election.
“She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that everything is fine with her,” the Russian president said during a forum in the eastern port city of Vladivostok. However, it can be difficult to glean Putin’s true political positions and intentions because he and other members of his inner circle often respond to Western accusations of misinformation, espionage and wrongdoing with sarcasm and even outright falsehoods.
Foreign officials typically try to avoid commenting directly on political campaigns in other countries because they may find themselves having to work with someone who they have previously portrayed in an unflattering light. Some German diplomats nevertheless appeared to break with that unofficial protocol following Tuesday’s debate.
After Trump criticized Germany’s energy policy, claiming the country was having second thoughts about its renewable energy transition, Berlin’s foreign ministry issued an uncharacteristically blunt rebuttal.
“Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables. And we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest,” the ministry said in a post on X. It followed that with, “PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs,” a reference to false rumors Trump amplified during the debate suggesting that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets.
Michael Roth, a lawmaker who chairs the German Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, was even more forthright, saying that Harris “dismantled” Trump in the debate and positioned herself as a candidate of change.
“She deliberately provoked Trump, and he fell into the trap. Although Harris has been part of the government for years, Trump seemed like an aging incumbent – old, angry and confused,” Roth posted on X.
One place that did appear hyper-concerned about offending the future U.S. president was Ukraine, which has been pleading with allies for months to let it fire Western long-range missiles into Russian territory to ward off Russian missile attacks and other assaults on Ukrainian territory. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is in Ukraine this week, has appeared to suggest that the U.S. and Britain are close to allowing that to happen.
“Great debates,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a longtime adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, on Wednesday morning on X, striking a neutral tone. “The teams have done good preparatory work. Emotionality is optimal and rationality in the arguments is evident. The positions of the candidates are clear.”
