During his time as US President, Republican Donald Trump is said to have secretly sent corona tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin – despite shortages in our own country. According to AFP, American journalist Bob Woodward reports this in his new book “War,” from which the Washington Post published excerpts on Tuesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed this on Wednesday.
When the corona pandemic raged in 2020 and tests were urgently needed everywhere, Trump sent a load of corona tests to the Russian president. Putin accepted, but advised Trump to keep the delivery secret: “I don't want you to tell anyone, because then people will be angry with you, not with me,” Putin told Trump, according to the book.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said in a radio interview on Tuesday that everyone in the USA was worried about corona tests at the time. “And this guy is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator for his personal use?” This is just the “latest blatant example of who Trump is.”
According to Woodward's research, Trump also entertains
continued personal contacts with Putin. Woodward quotes an unnamed Trump employee as saying that the latter
have spoken to Putin up to seven times since the end of his term in 2021. At the beginning of 2024, Trump asked an employee at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida to leave his office so that he could have a private phone call with Putin.
Kremlin spokesman Peskov denied this on Wednesday. “We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” he said in a written statement. “But the thing about the phone calls – that’s not true.”
Woodward became famous in the 1970s with his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein through research into the Watergate wiretapping scandal surrounding President Richard Nixon. Since then, he has repeatedly published investigative books about US presidents, including several about Trump.
