With his customary swagger and salty language, Russian President Vladimir Putin held forth on a sweeping array of topics in his traditional year-end news conference on Thursday, even throwing in a glowing assessment of Donald Trump.
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The Interfax news wire quoted Putin as saying about Trump, ‘He’s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt.
But Fred Hof, a former top US diplomat handling Syria now at the Atlantic Council, warned that regardless of Assad’s fate, until Russian Federation and Iran are willing to press him to stop bombing the Syrian people, there is little hope the political process will yield any results and that the bloodshed will end. “Putin said Russian Federation would work with “whomever the American voters choose”, but he singled out Trump”.
He said that Moscow had tried to maintain economic relations with Kiev and that Russian Federation is interested in the swift settlement of conflicts in eastern Ukraine through open and honest dialogue.
Putin largely reiterated Russia’s anger over the downing of one of its warplanes by Turkish jets last month.
Of course, Putin is highly respected within his own country.
“If Putin wants to go and knock the hell out of ISIS, I am all for it, 100 percent, and I can’t understand how anybody would be against it”, he said during a Republican presidential debate. “The peak of the crisis, in any case”, Putin said.
“I don’t respect Vladimir Putin”, Bush told CNN’s John Berman on “Anderson Cooper 360”.
Where once it shunned Russian Federation and imposed sanctions on its economy to punish Putin for his aggression against Ukraine, now Kerry publicly thanks Moscow for its “constructive” role in Syria. “They say – and it’s true – that they live in Russian Federation and have never left to live anywhere permanently”, Putin said. “We are told all the time, “Kosovo is a special case'”, Putin said”.
He said that the peak of the crisis had passed and stabilisation was under way.
Putin said that he was satisfied with the leadership of Russia’s Central Bank, which steeply hiked interest rates to prevent inflation, despite the pain that the move has dealt to businesses and borrowers.
NATO allies do not dispute Ankara’s version of the facts, but they are keen to engage Russian Federation in talks to avoid incidents that could flare from Moscow’s aggressive patrolling of alliance air borders around Turkey, the Baltic states and the North Sea.
During the news conference, Putin denied once again that regular Russian forces were in Ukraine, where pro-Moscow rebels began clashes with the Western-backed government in 2014.
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“What would probably happen is that SACEUR will insist that if an airborne contact is being tracked through a NATO AWACS, i.e. non Turkish, any action the Turks chose to take be coordinated with NATO commanders and in effect NATO would have a red card”, said Justin Bronk, a specialist in combat air power and technology at Britain’s RUSI defense think-tank.
