USA officials have pointed to the Russian government as the possible culprit of the attacks on DNC servers earlier this year that led to WikiLeaks published 20,000 DNC documents prior to the Democratic National Convention.
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Putin demurred, saying that he didn’t have a preference, but Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait pushed him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he did not know anything about the DNC hacks, but praised their value to the public.
In his interview with Bloomberg, Putin said: “They’re both using shock tactics, just each in their own way”.
Reports state that a computer network used by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the party’s fundraising committee for the U.S. House of Representatives was also targeted and hacked.
Obama said in August he would discuss the cyber attack with Putin if Russian Federation was responsible, but it would not “wildly” alter the two countries’ relationship. The leaks showed that party officials leaned favorably toward Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and led to Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepping down as the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.
“Let’s put an end to this abnormal situation which has lasted 70 years, and together start to build a new epoch in Russia-Japan ties that will last the next 70 years”, Abe told Putin during a speech translated into Russian after the pair met for talks in Russia’s far eastern city of Vladivostok.
In an interview two days before a G20 meeting in China with U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders, Mr. Putin said ongoing talks between Moscow and Washington were very hard but on the right track.
Putting forward a direction of economic cooperation between South Korea and Russia, Park stressed the need to bolster bilateral trade and investment; enhance cooperation in the development of Russia’s resource-rich Far East; and expand the scope of economic cooperation to include areas such as healthcare, medicine and the environment.
Moscow and Tokyo have held several rounds of talks on boosting bilateral cooperation and on the signing of a peace treaty, Lavrov said, adding that the results of those consultations, which Russian Federation and Japan would continue with, will be announced during Putin’s Tokyo trip.
“Frankly, I couldn’t even imagine that information of this kind could be of interest to the American public – that, it turns out, the campaign staff of one of the candidates, in this case Mrs. Clinton, worked for her and not for all Democratic Party candidates in equal measure”.
However, Putin said he is striving to fulfil the Minsk agreements. “We have never interfered, are not interfering and do not intend to interfere in domestic politics”, he said.
“We don’t trade in territories, although the problem of a peace treaty with Japan is a key one”, he said, adding that Moscow was keen to work with Tokyo to resolve the problem. “I’m not sure that even our Foreign Ministry experts are sensitive enough”.
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Putin, 63, said the state of hacking is so sophisticated that it’s impossible to know the identities or locations of the people ultimately behind them.
