She doesn’t always stick to diplomatic protocol in her language. She once told a Ukrainian commentator on a talk show, “Let me speak or you will really hear what Russian missiles sound like!” She said the Barack Obama administration had no foreign policy accomplishments. When Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry advised students at a Harvard Kennedy graduation speech that, under the Trump administration, they should “learn Russian,” Zakharova pointed out that he himself had had two terms to have done so. She gave her opinion of Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia during the Obama years, especially bluntly, saying, “We remember his professional incompetence.”
