Many U.S. officials have suggested Russian Federation was complicit in the hack that led to Wikileaks publishing 20,000 internal DNC emails on the eve of that party’s national convention in Philadelphia.
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Putin, who will meet with Erdogan at the G-20 summit, said he “valued” the Turkish apology for the plane incident.
“But”, he continued, “I want to tell you again – I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russian Federation has never done this”.
The FBI firmly believes that Russian Federation was behind the DNC hack, leading to concerns that Putin’s government may be trying to influence the US election by obtaining embarrassing documents from the Democratic Party and then releasing them through platforms such as WikiLeaks.
The U.S. election contest has been hard fought and frequently dominated by both candidates’ attitudes toward Russian Federation.
Speaking at a business forum in Russia’s Pacific port of Vladivostok attended by South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinz Abe, Putin said Moscow favoured bringing North Korea back to global negotiations over its nuclear programme.
To say that wouldn’t be “of interest to anyone” professes a profound ignorance of US politics. “We have never interfered, are not interfering and do not intend to interfere in domestic politics”, he said. The two leaders are discussing the islands, called the Southern Kurils by Russian Federation and the Northern Territories by Japan, for the second time this year after Abe met Putin in Sochi in May, snubbing an appeal by President Barack Obama not to visit.
“I don’t think they are setting the best example”, he said. “I’m not sure that even our Foreign Ministry experts are sensitive enough”.
In the interview with Bloomberg, the Russian leader also said the two leading presidential candidates are using “shock tactics” in their election campaigns.
According to a government source, after Abe’s one-on-one discussion with Putin, the prime minister told his close associates, “We agreed that we should both make decisions from the comprehensive perspective of our own national interests”. “You know there are so many hackers today, and they work with such minute precision, so finely”, he said, adding that hackers are able to “camouflage their activity under the activity of other hackers from other areas, other countries”. It’s an extremely hard thing to check, if it’s even possible to check.
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“One of the key problems is that we insist, and our American partners do not object to this, that the so-called healthy part of the opposition should be separated from the radical groups and terrorist organizations such as Jabhat Al-Nusra”, he said.
