Since then, further alleged Russian-linked breaches have occurred, with American intelligence officials saying they suspect Russian-connected hackers may have been involved in passing 20,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the whistleblower site Wikileaks and, most recently, of potentially breaking into voter registration systems in two states.
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Putin said that oil producers recognize that Iran, which has mostly restored the output, halted during three years of trade restrictions and sanctions imposed on it, deserves to complete its return to world markets.
“We should share a strong belief that close cooperation between Japan and Russian Federation will create possibilities for the future”, Abe said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin denied having any involvement in the July hack of the Democratic National Committee’s email server and suggested what matters is that content of the hack rather than who carried it out.
“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?”, the former KGB officer told Bloomberg in a wide-ranging interview.
A spate of other recent hacks, mostly targeting Democratic Party organizations but also state electoral systems, have raised alarms among USA intelligence officials that Moscow is trying to influence the American elections. Both Trump and Clinton have accused the other of having secret ties to the country, and Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, resigned following reports questioning his ties to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
The negotiations between senior USA and Russian officials, aimed at securing a broad ceasefire in Syria, are now seen lasting into the weekend as fighting in the country intensifies.
“He views everything through the prism of how he’s treated”, an anonymous source close to Assange told The New York Times.
The same group is thought to be responsible for hacks of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Assad’s future is not a focus of the current U.S. Putin’s criticism in the Bloomberg interview of negative campaigning in USA elections – “They attack each other and in some cases I wouldn’t like us to follow their example” – is as shallow as Clinton’s famous mockery of Putin’s return to the presidency after four years as prime minister as evidence of a Russian democracy deficit.
Putin argued that the hacks were a positive development, however. “We have never interfered, are not interfering and do not intend to interfere in domestic politics”, he said.
Abe’s remarks come after he and Putin discussed the issue the previous evening. It’s an extremely hard thing to check, if it’s even possible to check.
“Today it is obvious that we can’t let the chances that we have slide by”, Putin said.
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“I’m not sure that even our Foreign Ministry experts are sensitive enough”, he said.
