Warning that a “soft coup” is being waged against Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he sees attempts in the United States to “delegitimize” US President-elect Donald Trump using “Maidan-style” methods previously used in Ukraine, where readers will recall president Yanukovich was ousted in 2014 following a violent coup, which many suspect was conducted under the auspices of the US State Department and assorted US intelligence operations.
Putin said he doesn’t believe that Donald Trump met with prostitutes in Russia, calling the accusations part of a campaign to undermine the election result, and suggested that an internal political struggle is underway in the United States despite the fact that the presidential election is over, and added that reports of alleged Russian dossier on Trump are fake as “our security services do not chase every US billionaire.”
Unsubstantiated allegations made against Trump are “obvious fabrications,” Putin told reporters in the Kremlin on Tuesday. “People who order fakes of the type now circulating against the U.S. president-elect, who concoct them and use them in a political battle, are worse than prostitutes because they don’t have any moral boundaries at all,” he said.
The Russian president, cited by BBG, said that Trump wasn’t a politician when he visited Moscow in the past and Russian officials weren’t aware that he held any political ambitions.
Putin did not stop there and said that the compromising report compiled on Trump was a “hoax”, and said those who ordered the Trump dossier are “worse than prostitutes.”
Putin, who reiterated he had never met Trump, said he hoped that Moscow and Washington could eventually get their troubled relations back to normal, adding he has no reasons to “attack or defend him.”
“I don’t know Mr. Trump personally, I have never met him and don’t know what he will do on the international arena. So I have no grounds to attack him or criticize him for anything, or protect him or whatever,” Putin said.
Putin noted that there is a category of people who leave without saying goodbye, “out of respect for the present situation,” while others say goodbye all the time, but do not go away. “The outgoing administration, in my opinion, belongs to the second category,” he said.
One of the few remaining unjustified restrictions on the freedom of women–one of few remaining barriers to equality in the workplace–is the prohibition of prostitution. No other service industry is forbidden to women on the basis of gender. Other sexist obstacles have come down. It is time this one did.