U.S. President Donald Trump | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Critics say Russian President Vladimir Putin should be condemned for the nature of his Sunday election victory, but President Donald Trump didn’t mention that — or other alleged Kremlin bad behavior.
President Donald Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin on the Russian president’s Sunday election victory, and predicted the two men will soon meet in person—but did not raise the subjects of Russian cyber-aggression or the recent nerve agent attack on British soil widely attributed to Moscow.
“We had a very good call and I suspect that we’ll probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday, an apparent reference to Putin’s recent boast that Russia has developed new classes of nuclear weapons that can strike the United States.
Top U.S. intelligence and Congressional officials warn that Russia continues to spread digital propaganda and disinformation within the U.S., and is ready to meddle in the 2018 midterm elections. But Trump did not mention the subject on the phone call, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday.
“I don’t believe it came up on this specific call but it is something that we have spoken extensively about,” said Sanders, who said there are currently no specific plans for the time or place of a Trump-Putin meeting.
Sanders added that Trump did not address the nature of Putin’s victory in what critics called an only cosmetically democratic election. The Russian leader was elected to a third six-year term with about 75 percent of the vote after a campaign in which rival candidates were excluded and state-controlled media showered praise on him. “Sham elections for a dictator,” Freedom House declared.
Trump’s call with Putin drew a sharp retort from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a fierce Putin critic who said in a statement that “an American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.” McCain added that Trump “insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election to determine their country’s future, including the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin’s regime.”
“We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate,” Sanders responded. “What we do know is that Putin has been election in their country, and that’s not something that we can dictate to them, how they operate. We can only focus on the freeness and fairness of elections in our country.”
That attitude is a departure from decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which a succession of administrations have freely criticized anti-democratic events and elections in other nations.
