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‘One cold dude’: US presidents on Vladimir Putin
- US President Joe Biden prepares for his first summit with Vladimir Putin
- We look at what his predecessors thought of the Russian president
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US President Bill Clinton said he hung up after congratulating Vladimir 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, found 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”.
George W. Bush privately called Putin “one cold dude” before he was elected. But he was charmed at their first 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.
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The deeply religious Bush was reportedly touched by a story Putin told him about how a cross his mother gave him was the only thing to survive a fire at his dacha (country house).
His vice-president Dick Cheney, however, was unmoved saying when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”, referring to the Soviet secret service to which the Russian president once belonged.
But the relationship soured on both 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”.
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