NEW YORK, October 26. /TASS/. US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden believes that Russia poses the biggest threat to the United States on the international arena, he said in an interview with CBS published Sunday.

The interviewer asked the former vice president which country he thinks to be the most dangerous for the US. "Well, I think the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our security and our alliances is Russia," he said. "Secondly, I think that the biggest competitor is China." "And depending on how we handle that will determine whether we're competitors or we end up being in a more serious competition relating to force," Biden added.

He also underlined that policies of incumbent President Donald Trump also pose a significant danger to the US globally. "Look what he [Trump] does. He embraces every dictator in sight, and he pokes his finger in the eye of all of our friends," the former vice president noted. According to him, this approach of the White House occupant led to increased missile arsenal in North Korea and "Iran closer to <…> having enough fissile material to get a nuclear weapon than they had before." "You have our NATO allies backing away from us because they say, ‘We can't count on,’ us," Biden concluded.

The 2020 United States elections are scheduled for November 3. Nationwide, American citizens will go to the polls to elect 435 representatives to the House, 35 senators out of 100 to the Senate, and the President and Vice President of the United States. Incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden are vying for the highest office in the land. In addition, voters will head to the ballot boxes to decide on 13 US state and territorial governorships, and numerous other local elections will be held.

Disinformation campaign

US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden believes that Moscow could have masterminded a campaign of disinformation against him on the eve of the presidential elections on November 3, he told CBS.

The interviewer asked him whether the information leak from his son Hunter’s laptop is linked to attempts to spread disinformation attributed to Russia. "From what I've read and know the intelligence community warned the president that [Rudy] Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden," he claimed.

In mid-October, the New York Post published private messages obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop. The message exchanges show that Joe Biden’s son could have set up a meeting between his father, when he served as vice president, and a representative of Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings energy company. Hunter Biden was then on Burisma’s board of directors. Joe Biden also then called to fire Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin who launched an investigation into Burisma. The revelations gave Republicans a reason to accuse Biden and his son of corruption.

On October 19, Director of US National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said that the US intelligence community has no reason to believe the scandal evolving around Hunter Biden’s messages and emails is part of a disinformation campaign allegedly advanced by Russia. Representatives of the State Department, FBI, Justice Department and Trump himself all expressed similar opinions.

The issue of potential interference in US elections is regularly raised in the context of claims made by US authorities that Russia is engaged in such actions. Moscow has repeatedly denied these accusations. In February, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow regrets to note that more and more claims of the sort would emerge in the US as the elections near. According to Peskov, these inventions "have nothing to do with reality.".