Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will publish a response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed piece with a column of his own in a Russian newspaper, Reuters reported on Friday.

McCain’s column will appear in the newspaper Pravda, an idea that reportedly began as an offhand joke he made during a CNN interview regarding Putin’s Sept. 11 op-ed, which criticized his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama’s address the day before.

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“I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional,'” Putin wrote. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

Time magazine reported that after McCain jokingly said he would like to write a response, Foreign Policy magazine reporter John Hudson contacted Pravda to ask whether that would be a possibility. The newspaper’s English editor, Dmitri Sudakov, was quoted as saying it would be “pleased to publish a story penned by such a prominent politician as John McCain.”

While no publication date has been set for McCain’s column, spokesperson Brian Rogers indicated the issue of a possible U.S. military strike against Syria would be addressed.

“There are a lot of issues that I’m sure Sen. McCain would want to address,” Rogers told Time. “Democracy and human rights in Russia and certainly the Putin regime’s aiding and abetting of the Syrian regime, which has killed 100,000 of its own people.”

[Images via Agence France-Presse]