At a press meeting this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin backed Vice President Kamala Harris and said he wanted her to be the next U.S. president because she “laughs so expressively and infectiously.”

Putin said what he did at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok with a smile on his face. He seemed to be making fun of the idea that Russia has a stake in the U.S. election or would try to meddle in American politics.

“I told you that… if you can call it that, our favorite was Vice President Biden. He dropped out of the race, but he told all of his followers to back Ms. Harris. That’s what we’ll do too.” Putin said, “We will back her.”

He said, “She laughs so freely and contagiously that it means everything is okay with her.”

Trump “introduced such a number of limits and bans against Russia that no president has ever introduced before,” Putin said. He said he would rather not see Trump return to the White House.

“If Ms. Harris is feeling good,” he said, “maybe she will stop doing things like this.”

“At the end of the day, the American people make the choice, and we will accept that choice. It is not up to us to decide who the winners are,” he said.

U.S. news sources, like Bloomberg News, rushed to reassure their readers that Putin doesn’t really want Harris to be president:

“Putin’s words were basically presidential trolling a day after the Biden administration said that groups backed by Russia had been working for years to interfere with the US election and generally help the Kremlin’s goals. Internal planning papers from one of the groups showed that Russia wanted to make sure that Donald Trump or another Republican candidate won the White House.”

“But they also show that the Kremlin thinks that relations will not get better no matter who wins the US President. Relations are at their worst in decades because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Putin said Biden was “likely” to say on state TV in February that he would rather have him than Trump as president.”