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46 I Eastern Europe bne November 2020
Putin remembers huge portraits of black activist and US Communist Party member Angela Davis on display in the USSR.
Putin launches damage control, as Biden looks set to win US elections
Ben Aris in Berlin
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Kremlin was much closer to the US Democratic Party than the Republicans, as it
has lots of “shared values” thanks to Russia’s Soviet past.
Observers have speculated that the Kremlin is going into damage control mode as it looks increasingly likely that the Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate in the US presidential
due in November, will walk home to
a victory over incumbent US President Donald Trump. A Biden administration is widely expected to be much more assertive towards Russia than Trump has been.
Putin has already tried to head off some of the Russia hysteria that is increasingly used for domestic political purposes
in the US by suggesting a “mutual
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non-interference” pact in each other's elections in September.
“One of the main strategic challenges of our time is the risk of a large-scale confrontation in the digital sphere,” Putin said in the Kremlin statement. “We would like to once again appeal to the United States with a proposal to approve a comprehensive programme of practical measures to reset our relations in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT).”
Putin said that the Kremlin has had no response to this proposal.
Common values
The Kremlin appears to be increasingly worried that relations with the US that are already very bad are about to take
a big turn for the worse and that the Biden campaign is already locking itself
into a tough stance on Russia before he even manages to get elected president.
“We hear rather sharp anti-Russian rhetoric from Biden,” Putin said in
a long interview on October 7. “Sadly, we are now used to it. But something worth mentioning: The Democratic Party is traditionally closer to so-called liberal values, to social democratic ideas, if compared to Europe. It was from the social democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved.”
Putin went on to point out that he grew up under communism and was a rank and file member of the party for 18 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“I believed in the party’s ideas. I still like many of these left-wing values: equality and fraternity. What is bad about them?” Putin asked.