Russia on Tuesday took a swipe at Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., after Kennedy called Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a “bully.”
“We don’t wear rose-colored glasses,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “We are well aware of the extent to which the American Establishment is being held hostage to stereotypes and is under the heaviest domestic anti-Russian pressure.”
Kennedy joined a congressional delegation to Moscow last week, and returned with sharp words for Russia’s top diplomat. Kennedy’s statement followed meetings in which both sides exchanged accusations of election interference, although preliminary Russian reports portrayed the American lawmakers as relatively soft-spoken on the matter.
“[Lavrov’s] a bully,” Kennedy told CNN on Monday. “He impressed me as the sort of guy who started out in the world as a smartass and worked his way up.”
Kennedy traveled to Moscow as part of a trip orchestrated by U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman to coincide with the embassy’s Independence Day celebration. Lawmakers met with Lavrov as well as counterparts in Russia’s parliamentary body for roughly five hours of discussions largely focused on interference in the 2016 presidential elections.
“We would bring it up, and they would push back with all the ways we interfere with their politics in terms of funding of NGOs, and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told the Washington Examiner. “We pushed back hard. I think they’re certainly on notice that there should be no meddling in 2018.”
The meeting was timed for the run-up for President Trump’s one-on-one summit with Putin, scheduled for next week in Helsinki, Finland. That encounter will be the first formal bilateral meeting between the two since Trump took office; it will cap a week of summits with western European allies.
“So I have NATO, I have the U.K. — which is somewhat in turmoil,” Trump told reporters Tuesday morning. “And I have Putin. Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all. Who would think? Who would think?”
