The US president turns 80 on Sunday
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will not be congratulating his US counterpart Joe Biden on his upcoming 80th birthday, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has said.
“If I’m not mistaken, there are no such plans,” Peskov said on Wednesday, when asked if Putin will be sending birthday greetings to Biden on November 20.
Biden, who is the oldest person to sit in the Oval Office, turns 80 years old this Sunday.
The US President also didn’t congratulate Putin when the Russian leader celebrated his 70th birthday on October 7.
Relations between the US and Russia are currently at their lowest since the Cold War era, with Moscow blaming Washington for waging a “hybrid war” against it in Ukraine.
However, Peskov praised Biden for his “restrained and professional reaction” to the missile explosion on Tuesday that killed two people in a Polish village on that country’s border with Ukraine.
While Kiev and some officials in Warsaw hurried to blame Moscow for the alleged strike, the US president pointed out that “it is unlikely, in the minds of the trajectory, that [the missile]was fired from Russia.”
READ MORE: Russia ‘unlikely’ to have been behind Poland ‘missile strike’ – Biden
Russia’s defense ministry denied carrying out any strikes near the Ukraine-Poland border on the day, insisting that the missile in question had been fired by Kiev’s forces.
Later, Polish President Andrzej Duda announced that “there is a high probability that it was a Ukrainian air defense missile” and that there was no evidence to suggest the weapon had been launched by Russia.
