The Kremlin has confirmed that Donald Trump sent Vladimir Putin this week, as reported in a book by US political journalist Bob Woodward, which revealed that Covid tests were scarce in the early stages of the pandemic.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Russian president, largely confirmed Woodward's account. Reveals how Trump secretly sent tests to the Russian president for his personal use, despite America's lack of access.
In the early stages of the epidemic, when there was not enough equipment, “all countries tried to somehow exchange among themselves,” Peskov told reporters on Thursday. “We sent ventilator units to the US and they sent us these tests,” he said. He said the exchanges occurred “when the epidemic started” and tests were “rare commodities” during this time.
According to Woodward, the Russian president told Trump: “You don't want to tell anybody because people will be mad at you.”
Woodward also reported that Trump and Putin may have spoken on the phone seven times since 2021, including Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
However, Peskov denied this account, saying the calls “did not happen”.
Trump's ties to Putin are detailed in a new book by Woodward, the famous American reporter who, along with Carl Bernstein, uncovered the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon's resignation as US president. Woodward has written and co-authored three books about the Trump presidency. His latest work, War, focuses on the Biden presidency and covers Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Israel's campaign against Hamas, and US domestic politics.
While revelations of Trump's ties to Putin shed new light on the former US president's campaign to pressure Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine, it is considered They don't harm his remarkable reputation with his foundation, which has remained steadfast despite numerous scandals, criminal and civil cases, including his conviction for 34 crimes in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the 2016 election results.
Separately, a Kremlin spokesman denied reports by M15 chief Ken McCallum that the GRU military intelligence agency was “on a continuous mission to create chaos on British and European streets”. In a speech on Tuesday, McCallum said intelligence agencies had seen “arson, vandalism and more.” Compares with intelligence reports from across Europe.
The issue was raised by EU foreign ministers in May, when one minister said they were deeply concerned about “sabotage, physical sabotage, organized, financed and carried out by Russian proxies”.
Responding to McCallum's comments, a Kremlin spokesman said the allegations were not attention-grabbing. “All these reports are completely baseless and baseless,” he said.
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