Assassin!

It is not often that one head of state openly insults another, but when Joe Biden was asked if he thought Vladimir Putin was a killer, he nodded in agreement. The Russian government was understandably upset and recalled its ambassador to Washington for consultations, while Putin simply replied ironically that he, for his part, wished the US president well.

The word assassin comes from the name of a medieval Persian sect, the 'Hassasin', who lived in the fortress of Alamut, in a mountainous area near the Caspian Sea, from where their owner, known as the 'Old Man of the Mountain', would stuff them with hashish before despatching them to commit murders which, on account of their difficulty, almost always turned out to be suicidal operations. In order to achieve this, in addition to filling their lungs with hashish, he would also fill their imaginations with the Huris that awaited them in paradise, in a technique that is still successfully used almost 1,000 years later by recruiters for Al-Qaeda or Daesh. The old man apparently made a fortune before they managed to finish him off and sent him on his way to enjoy his fair share of the Hajis.

As defined by the Royal Academy's first meaning of the dictionary, murder means "to kill someone with malice aforethought or for a reward". Other meanings refer to "to cause great affliction or great displeasure", or "to deceive in a serious matter", which do not seem to have the same drama as the first. I wonder which of these three possibilities Biden would fit Putin into, though my impression is that they could all apply to him should one think of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the opponents Sergei Skripal and Anton Navalny (first meaning); Hillary Clinton when he contributed to her defeat in the 2017 US election (second meaning); and the lies he has told so many times, such as denying that his forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Ukrainian plains, or even that it wasn't his soldiers dressed as "little green men" who occupied and then annexed Crimea.

If Biden wanted to let him know that Putin's strange romance with Donald Trump over the past four years was over for reasons as yet unexplained (blackmail?), he could do so without poking him in the eye in such a blatant manner. For, although Russia has an ageing population and only exports gas and oil (Senator Mitt Romey says it is "a gas station masquerading as a country") and it is true that its soft power is clearly improvable as nobody really follows Russian fashion or cinema and nobody thinks of going there to study. But Russia is not the "regional power" that Obama scornfully referred to, it is the only other nuclear superpower, it has powerful conventional military forces that pose a serious threat to Europe, it has a permanent seat with veto power in the UN Security Council, and although it is not an economic power and its GNP is only slightly higher than Spain's, it is the eleventh largest economy on the planet. It is also an ideological enemy that, with Putin, has embraced a conservative, nationalist and orthodox illiberalism that represents an alternative to the democratic liberalism we profess in Europe, with the exceptions of Hungary, Poland and, somewhat further afield, Turkey. And as if that were not enough, Putin's Russia misses the international influence and respect that the USSR once enjoyed and is willing to regain them even at a high price, as evidenced by Its actions in Georgia or Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea, which have led to serious sanctions by the US and the EU, or its growing presence in the different conflicts in the Middle East.

Biden should rethink the relationship with Russia, and he should do so hand in hand with Europeans, restoring trust and support for our security that Trump has repeatedly disregarded. Because Russia must be restrained in its illegal and aggressive behaviour, but we must also seek its cooperation in resolving issues where it is in our interest to work together, such as the fight against pandemics, climate change and nuclear proliferation. It is not easy, and it will certainly not be achieved with insults.

Jorge Dezcallar, Ambassador of Spain