By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) -The Kremlin said on Wednesday that the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump had sent COVID tests to Russia but it denied reports that Trump had spoken at all to President Vladimir Putin since leaving office.
In his book “War”, U.S. journalist Bob Woodward quoted an unnamed Trump aide as saying that Trump and Putin may have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021, according to The Washington Post’s summary of the book.
It details one incident when Trump ordered the aide away from his office at his Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago in early 2024 so he could conduct a private phone call with Putin.
“As for the calls, that’s a lie,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters. “There were no calls, and they did not hold phone calls after Trump ceased to be president.”
Also according to the Woodward book, Trump while still president in 2020 had sent coveted COVID tests to Putin during a crippling shortage in the United States and around the world.
“As for the tests, when the pandemic began, countries did not have enough equipment. And many countries then exchanged such gestures of support and sent each other shipments of various equipment they had,” Peskov said.
In April 2020, Trump’s administration accepted 60 tons of medical equipment from Russia.
“We sent a batch of artificial respiration devices, and several test devices came from America,” Peskov said. “The first testers worked very poorly.”
“It was a common practice at that time to exchange such support,” he added.
‘MADE-UP STORIES’
Trump’s campaign dismissed the reports in Woodward’s book saying, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that 20 current and former Trump and Biden administration officials and career intelligence officials said they did not know about any Trump-Putin talks since the Republican left the White House in January 2021 but that “it was not inconceivable”.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris questioned why tests were sent to Russia during the pandemic.
“Everybody was scrambling to get these kits, these COVID test kits, and this guy, who’s president of the United States, is sending them to Russia, this murderous dictator, for his personal use?” Harris told the Howard Stern show.
Woodward told CBS that the tests were precious assets at a time when COVID was “running wild” worldwide.
According to summaries of the book by the Post and the New York Times, U.S. President Joe Biden was privately scathing about several foreign leaders including Putin.
Biden called Putin the “epitome of evil” and used crude language about him, according to the Post summary.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington, editing by Gareth Jones)
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