MOSCOW – Russia has called back its ambassador to the United States and launched a storm of scorn at President Biden after he said in a television interview that he thought President Vladimir V. Putin was a murderer.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that it had summoned its Washington envoy, Anatoly I. Antonov, to Moscow “to analyze what needs to be done in the context of relations with the United States”.
“We are interested in avoiding an irreversible deterioration in relations, should the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this,” said a statement by the Itamaraty spokeswoman, Maria V. Zakharova.
Ms. Zakharova did not specify whether a specific event led to the decision to dismiss Antonov, but the rare move occurred when Russian authorities reacted angrily to an interview with Biden broadcast on ABC News. In the interview, when asked if he thought Putin was a “killer”, Biden replied: “Mmm hmm, I think”.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov described Biden’s comments as “very bad”.
“He clearly does not want to improve relations with our country and we will act on that very basis,” Peskov told reporters on Thursday.
Despite Biden’s longstanding criticism of Putin, some Russian analysts expressed hope that the Kremlin could establish a productive working relationship with the White House in areas of common interest. Although Biden told ABC that he would continue to look for places “where it is in our mutual interest to work together” with Russia, some officials in Moscow responded by dismissing the possibility of any cooperation.
“This is a defining moment,” wrote Konstantin I. Kosachev, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Upper House of the Russian Parliament, in a Facebook post on Thursday in reference to Biden’s interview. “All expectations regarding the new policy of the United States government towards Russia have been canceled out by this crude statement.”
Mr Kosachev warned that Russia would respond more, without specifying how, to Mr Biden’s comments “if explanations and excuses do not come from the American side”.
On state television, news programs devoted extensive airtime to describing Biden as confused and out of reach, while politicians lined up to express their anger and threaten a response.
Pyotr O. Tolstoy, the deputy mayor of the lower house of parliament, thundered that “the only language” that Americans understand “is, unfortunately, the language of force”. Another senior lawmaker, Andrei A. Turchak, described Biden’s statement as “a challenge for our entire nation”.
Russian authorities did not make specific threats immediately. But escalating tensions with the West often accompany the internal repressions of the Kremlin, which claims that the United States is secretly supporting opposition politicians in Russia to weaken Putin. For example, Russia’s internet regulator warned this week that it was preparing to completely block access to Twitter in the country from a month on, after restricting access to the American social network last week.
Some Western officials accuse Putin, among other things, of ordering the assassination attempt of his loudest domestic critic, Aleksei A. Navalny, by a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia last year. Putin denied having played any role in this near-deadly poisoning, mocking in December that if Russian agents wanted to kill the opposition leader, “They probably would have finished the job”.
The Russian government is also linked to attacks on foreign soil, including the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018, and the shooting death of a former commander of Chechen separatists in Berlin the following year.
Putin signed a law in 2006 legalizing selective killings abroad – legislation that Russian lawmakers said at the time was inspired by American and Israeli conduct.