Kremlin spokesman denies Trump is “Putin’s man”

Dmitry Peskov file photo adapted from image at kremlin.ru/wikimedia commons

(Interfax – December 21, 2016)

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has dismissed the suggestions that US President Elect Donald Trump is “Putin’s man” as absurd.

“You know, this is completely absurd. This is just nonsense,” privately-owned Interfax news agency quoted him as saying in an interview with Mir 24 television channel on 21 December.

Peskov added that “Trump is a person who is not part of the traditional US political elite and we know that from the very beginning this elite most actively rejected him”.

According to him, Trump is “much less blinkered” and has “freer behaviour” that the political elite.

“Judging by his past, judging by his success in business, it could be said that he is a successful person. Being different from the norm allows him achieve success,” Peskov said.

He added: “To say that he is Putin’s man only because he speaks of readiness to communicate with Putin in order to solve problems is absurd. This is totally unc! onstructive, I mean perfectly unconstructive”.

According to Peskov, Russophobia has been “a permanent companion to the American electoral system in recent decades”. “And every time we observe this pre-election cycle, which is accompanied with outbursts of Russophobia. This time around Russophobia was elevated to the pinnacle of the election campaign. We were all joking about this but this is how it was – Putin was an absolutely fully fledged participant in this election campaign,” Peskov said.

This, he said, was an attempt to steer attention away from “a real discussion about problems in the economy and security in the USA itself”. “The easiest thing is to substitute this with this brouhaha and pushing the image of absolute evil in the shape of Putin and Russia,” Peskov said.

[featured image is file photo]

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