Washington [USA], June 7: In an interview with ABC News journalist David Muir while attending the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in France, President Biden declared that he has known President Putin "for more than 40 years", even though the Russian President During the 1980s, he also served as a secret intelligence officer for the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB).
"I have known him for more than 40 years. He has worried me for 40 years. He is not a nice person," Mr. Biden (82 years old) said.
According to RT, Mr. Putin was an undercover agent for the KGB in Leningrad (formerly known as Saint Petersburg) in the early 1980s. In 1982, when he was 30 years old, Mr. Putin worked in East Germany.
Mr. Putin then worked as assistant to Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and served as deputy mayor from 1991-1996. He then worked at the Kremlin and became head of the Federal Security Service, the force that succeeded the KGB after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
He was only known to the international public until 1999, after he was unexpectedly appointed by President Boris Yeltsin as acting prime minister.
Mr. Biden was a US senator from 1973 until he took office as vice president in 2009. In March 2011, Mr. Biden is said to have first met Mr. Putin, then prime minister of Russia.
Mr. Biden's statement caused many surprises. The New York Post said that it was unlikely that the US leader knew Mr. Putin for more than 40 years, while CNN said that the White House owner "seems to have exaggerated" the story.
In the interview, President Biden announced that he would not allow Ukraine to use American weapons to attack Moscow or the Kremlin, but only target targets near the border, where Russian weapons are being launched into Ukraine.
"They (weapons) are allowed to be used near the border. We do not allow attacks 200 miles into Russia, we do not allow attacks on Moscow, the Kremlin," Mr. Biden emphasized.
President Putin warned on June 5 that the US providing weapons and allowing Ukraine to use them is a direct act of involvement in the conflict against Russia. He emphasized that Moscow has the right to act in a similar way.
Source: Thanh Nien Newspaper