The Russians and Chinese are flexing their military muscles and ISIS remains on the march — but the leader of the free world on Friday had to take time to explain why he moved a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office seven years ago.

“I love Winston Churchill. I love the guy,” President Obama insisted at a news conference during his visit to London, saying the bust was only moved to another spot in the White House so it could be replaced by a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The kerfuffle broke out after London’s mayor charged that the “part-Kenyan” Obama’s “ancestral dislike of the British empire” led him to toss the bust.

The president responded by reassuring the world that the bust remained safe and sound, the first time he has publicly addressed the non-issue that’s dogged him through two terms in office.

“My private office is called the Treaty Room. And right outside the door of the Treaty Room, so that I see it every day, including on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, I see a bust of Winston Churchill,” the president said.

Obama acknowledged President George W. Bush kept the bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, but said he decided to redecorate.

‘I thought it was appropriate…to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office’ - President Obama during a news conference in London

“I thought it was appropriate and I suspect most people here in the United Kingdom might agree that as the first African-American president, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office,” Obama said.

Critics have been repeating the story for years that Obama ordered the bust removed because of animosity toward the UK.

And in a column in The Sun Friday, London Mayor Boris Johnson charged that “something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009. Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why. It was a bust of Winston Churchill — the great British wartime leader.

“Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire — of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.”