The Kremlin on Monday was cautious about the possibility of Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy, saying that the vice-president had made no discernable contribution to relations with Moscow beyond some unfriendly rhetoric.
US President Biden abandoned his re-election bid on Sunday under growing pressure from his fellow Democrats and endorsed Vice-President Harris as the party’s candidate to face Republican Donald Trump in the November election.
Asked if Russia was surprised by Biden’s move, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that events in the United States over recent years had taught Moscow not to be surprised by anything and that in any case Russia had different priorities.
“In recent years, what has been happening in the United States has taught us not to be surprised by anything,” Peskov told reporters on a conference call. “We were not very surprised.”
For Russia, Peskov said, the priority was achieving the goals of what President Vladimir Putin calls the special military operation in Ukraine. Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022.
The Kremlin was unable to assess what a Harris candidacy would mean for relations because Moscow had so far noticed no contribution at all from Harris to those relations besides some instances of unfriendly rhetoric, Peskov said.
“At the moment, we cannot assess the potential candidacy of Ms Harris from the point of view of our bilateral relations because so far her contribution to our bilateral relations has not been noticed,” Peskov said.
“There were statements that were replete with rhetoric quite unfriendly towards our country, but her actions in relations to bilateral relations come under neither a plus nor a minus sign.”
Harris has repeatedly voiced support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and accused Russia of waging a “barbaric and inhumane” war.
Asked if Putin and Harris had ever met or had any contacts, Peskov said: “To be honest, I can’t remember a single contact between President Putin and Ms Harris.”
Before Biden’s exit from the race, Putin had said several times that he felt Biden was preferable as the future US president to Donald Trump for Russia, even after Biden cast the Kremlin chief as a “crazy SOB” though some of his remarks have been ambiguous.
Russian state television led news bulletins with the news of Biden leaving the election race and Biden’s support for Harris, though it said it was unclear if Harris would earn the Democratic nomination.
On the streets of Moscow, some said that US politics never produced anything good for Russians, other than the supply of US chicken legs as the Soviet Union collapsed.
“What does it matter to us whether it is Harris, Trump, Biden or (George) Bush?” Andrei Popkov, a 52-year-old programmer, told Reuters in the shadow of the Bolshoi Theatre in central Moscow.
“Did we ever have anything good other than chicken legs?” he said. The so called “nozhki Busha”, or “Bush legs”, were supplied to Russia after a deal between Mikhail Gorbachev and George HW Bush.
But others expressed guarded hopes that a change of leader in the United States could lead to better ties and said that it was time for Biden to leave.
“It is possible to stop the supply of weapons to Ukraine and, perhaps, the war will stop then,” said Alla Gorevanova, a 57-year-old. “This is my hope.”
“I think it’s time for this elderly man (Biden) to stop being a leader,” Gorevanova said, adding that Biden appeared unable to properly assess either the domestic or global political situation.