(Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Saturday that Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s description of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “murderous dictator” exposed how politicians in Washington sought to impose their views on the world.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s comment was the latest jab in exchanges revolving around the U.S. presidential election and the Kremlin’s more than 2 1/2-year-old war in Ukraine.

“The lofty political establishment of the United States of America, to all appearances, is infused with such a political culture,” Russian news agencies quoted Peskov as telling a television interviewer.

“This is probably the quintessence of the very model of international relations that they are trying to foist on the entire world, a model that most in the world are beginning to like less and less.”

Peskov’s comments appeared to be in response to Harris’s criticism of a report in a newly released book by U.S. journalist Bob Woodward that Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump, while in office, had sent COVID tests to Russia at the height of the pandemic. In a radio interview, she described Putin as a “murderous dictator”.

With relations between Russia and the United States plunging to depths not seen since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, each side has told the other to stop discussing domestic issues.

The United States told Putin to stop commenting on the U.S. election back in February and then again last month when the Kremlin leader suggested he favoured Harris over Trump in the forthcoming poll because of her “infectious laugh”.

That exchange prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to say that Putin “often jokes” in his public statements.

According to summaries of Woodward’s book by the Washington Post and the New York Times, U.S. President Joe Biden was privately scathing about several foreign leaders, including Putin, whom he described as the “epitome of evil”.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski; Editing by Daniel Wallis)