Slate: What Putin Was Really Saying in Helsinki

[TomSea]

What Putin Was Really Saying in Helsinki
Trump was there to make friends. Putin had a different agenda.

By Joshua Keating
July 16, 20182:09 PM

While most of the commentary about Monday’s bizarre press conference in Helsinki rightly focuses on President Trump’s smirking, obsequious performance, it’s worth looking closely at Vladimir Putin’s remarks as well.

Putin did not seem nearly as eager to please as his counterpart. While Trump declined to specifically criticize Russia for anything­—election interference, the annexation of Crimea, support for Assad, assassinations on foreign soil—Putin included in his opening remarks some pointed criticism of Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal. “Thanks to the Iranian nuclear deal, Iran became most controlled country in the world, it submitted to the control of IAEA,” Putin said, according to the live translation, adding that the deal “effectively ensures the peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program and strengthens the non-proliferation regime.” He also suggested the U.S. should do more to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to comply with the Minsk agreement—referring to the internationally brokered deal to halt fighting in Ukraine’s Donbass region. Trump, notably, did not mention Russian financial and military support for separatists in the region or accuse Russia of violating the agreement, as his own U.N. ambassador did just a few weeks ago. In fact, Trump did not mention Ukraine at all in his remarks.

Putin also used the platform to take aim at some of his longtime boogeymen in the West. In suggesting that U.S. and Russian law enforcement and intelligence officers should work together to investigate election interference—a ludicrous notion that Trump called an “interesting idea”—Putin also proposed that they look into the activities of Bill Browder, the U.S.-British financier and former Russia-based investor who has campaigned for harsh sanctions against Russian officials since the death of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison in 2009. A Russian court charged Browder with tax evasion (he dismissed the charges as baseless and politically motivated) and found him guilty in absentia, making him the subject of several Interpol notices (which Western governments have mostly ignored).

Read more at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/vladimir-putin-says-you-can-trust-no-one-at-press-conference-with-donald-trump.html

The article goes on to quote Putin's reference to George Soros today. I had not heard that.