Kremlin says Trump and Harris should leave Putin out of their fight

MOSCOW (Reuters) -The Kremlin said on Wednesday it did not like the way Vladimir Putin's name was bandied around in the U.S. presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and urged the candidates to stop dragging him into their political fight.

The Russian president's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was speaking a week after Putin said in a teasing remark that he favoured Harris over Trump, prompting the White House to say Putin should stop commenting on the Nov. 5 election.

Peskov told reporters the Kremlin had not directly followed Tuesday night's debate, but had tracked news reports of it.

"Of course, we noticed that both candidates mentioned our president, mentioned our country. Of course, the position is quite clear - the U.S. as a whole, no matter which party the candidates are from, maintains a negative attitude, an unfriendly attitude towards our country," he said.

"Putin's name is used as one of the instruments in the domestic political struggle in the U.S. We really, really don't like it, and we hope that they will leave our president's name alone."

During the debate, Trump and Harris engaged in combative exchanges over Putin and the war in Ukraine.

Harris told Trump that Putin "would eat you for lunch" and that the Russian leader would be "sitting in Kyiv right now" if Trump were president.

Trump said it was in the best interests of the United States "to get this war finished and just get it done", without saying whether he wanted Ukraine to win.

He repeated his assertion that, if elected, he would settle the conflict before even taking office. He did not say how he would achieve that. He also reproached U.S. President Joe Biden for not phoning Putin in the past two years.

Peskov, in answer to a question, said a phone call would not have ended the conflict. What was needed, he said, was for the U.S. "to abandon its policy of using Ukraine as disposable material in an attempt to suppress everything connected with the Russian Federation".

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Anastasia Teterevleva and Mark Trevelyan, Editing by Andrew Osborn and Timothy Heritage)