Rubio: Russia is governed by ‘gangster’, North Korea by ‘lunatic’

Republican US presidential candidate Marco Rubio has called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “gangster” and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a “lunatic.”

In an unusual attack on the Russian leader, Rubio said, “Russia is governed today by a gangster. He's basically an organized crime figure who controls a government and a large territory.”

“This is a person who kills people because they're his political enemies. If you're a political adversary of Vladimir Putin, you wind up with plutonium in your drink or shot in the street,” he said during a foreign policy speech in South Carolina on Friday.

The freshman senator from Florida went on to term Russia as a major threat to the United States. “We have a gangster running the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Cuban-American politician also called North Korea a threat to the US and slammed its supreme leader.

“In North Korea, a lunatic possesses dozens of nuclear weapons, and a long-range missile that can hit the United States,” he said.

Tensions between the United States and Russia have escalated steadily since April, 2014, when the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea reunited with the Russian Federation following a referendum a month earlier.

Washington accuses Moscow of arming and supporting pro-Russian forces fighting in the predominantly Russian-speaking areas in eastern Ukraine. Moscow dismisses the accusations as "groundless".

The Kremlin has described Washington’s foreign policy on Ukraine as “aggressive”, saying the policy “fails to meet present-day realities and demonstrates that the United States actually wants to dominate the world.”

The mainstream US media have also attempted to demonize the Russian president for standing up against Washington’s hegemonistic foreign policy.

Republican as well as Democratic politicians have also attacked Putin in order to gain the support of the US military-industrial complex, which is provoking war with Russia.

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