Russia recalled its ambassador to the US and unleashed a storm of derision aimed at President Biden after he said in a television interview that he thought President Vladimir V. Putin was a killer.

Russia’s foreign ministry said late on Wednesday that it had summoned its envoy in Washington, Anatoly I. Antonov, to Moscow “in order to analyse what needs to be done in the context of relations with the US.”

“We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this,” the foreign ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria V. Zakharova, said in a statement.

Zakharova did not specify whether a specific event had prompted the decision to recall Antonov, but the rare move came as Russian officials reacted with fury to an interview with Biden aired by ABC News. In the interview, when asked whether he thought Putin was a “killer”, Biden responded: “Mmm hmm, I do.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, described Biden’s comments as “very bad”.

“He clearly does not want to improve relations with our country, and we will be proceeding based precisely on this,” Peskov said on Thursday.

Despite Biden’s long-running criticism of Putin, some Russian analysts had voiced hope that the Kremlin could forge a productive working relationship with the White House on areas of common interest.

While Biden told ABC that he would continue to look for places “where it’s in our mutual interest to work together” with Russia, some officials in Moscow responded by dismissing the possibility of any cooperation.

“This is a watershed moment,” Konstantin I. Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, wrote in a post on Facebook on Thursday in reference to Biden’s interview. “Any expectations for the new US administration’s new policy towards Russia have been written off by this boorish statement.”

On state television, news programmes devoted extensive airtime to describing Biden as confused and out of touch, while politicians lined up to voice their anger and threaten a response.

New York Times News Service