The article studies the “communicative sabotage” speech genre as a possible way of reacting to criticism in the response utterances of the presidents of Russia and the USA, V. V. Putin and B. Obama. The internal genre tactics of communicative sabotage are considered in relation to Grice’s Cooperative Principles. Both approaches are perceived as complementary in relation to each other, which allows to get a holistic perception of deviations from norms of interpersonal communication.