In annual press conference, Russian leader says he always believed Trump would win and denies claims of election interference

Vladimir Putin has used his annual press conference to launch a stinging attack on the outgoing Obama administration and the Democratic party and to claim he had always known Donald Trump would win the US election.

“Nobody believed he’d win. Except us, of course. We always believed,” said Putin, to applause from some of the 1,400 journalists gathered.

He dismissed all accusations of Russian interference in the vote, insisting that US claims of meddling by Moscow were due to the Democrats being sore losers.

“The Democratic party and the US administration are trying to chalk their own failures up to outside factors,” the president said. “They lost everywhere, and are looking for outside factors to blame. It is not very dignified.”

Putin press conference: don't blame me for Democrats' election loss – as it happened Read more

Before the vote, the US administration accused Russia of hacking the Democrats’ servers, and this month it was reported that the CIA believed Russia had intervened with the specific goal of helping Trump. Trump has dismissed the claims as implausible.

Putin said he agreed with Trump’s suggestion, made during the campaign, that the hacks could have been carried out by an individual sitting on their bed. “The president-elect was absolutely right to note that nobody knows who these hackers are. Maybe they were in a different country, and not in Russia. Maybe it was just someone sitting on their sofa or bed. It’s very easy now to show one origin country, when you’re actually in a different place.”



Putin declined to comment on Barack Obama’s claim that he had personally asked Putin to put a stop to hacking efforts. “I never talk about what is said in personal conversations with other leaders,” he said.” More important than who did the hacking were the revelations contained in them about the Democratic party, he said, but “instead of apologising to their voters they started shouting about who organised the attacks”.



Asked about recent comments by Obama that “Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave” over poll findings that 37% of Republican voters admitted to being fans of Putin, the president said it was a sign that the two countries were close.



“That means a large part of the American people have the same views as us about how the world should be organised,” he said, adding that many Americans “agree with our understanding of traditional values”.



In a potential sign that rhetoric about the US – portrayed in recent years as the biggest threat to Russia – could be softening as Trump enters the White House, Putin implied that the country was no longer a danger. Asked about his comments this week that Russia’s army was stronger than “any aggressor”, he conceded that the US had the strongest army in the world. “But I said we were stronger than any – pay attention – aggressor,” he said. By implication, the US was no longer seen as an aggressor.

Putin’s marathon press conferences have become an annual tradition during his 16 years in charge of Russia (12 as president and four as prime minister), and typically involve a mix of carefully scripted questions and wildcards from journalists, ranging across topics from geopolitics to regional issues. Journalists bring signs, photographs and flags to wave in the hope of catching the president’s attention. On this occasion one had brought a poster portraying Putin in a Superman costume.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Journalists hold up signs during Putin’s press conference. Photograph: Planet Pix/Rex/Shutterstock

The session lasted almost four hours. Putin touched on other issues, railing against the west for causing the Ukraine crisis and affirming that the murder of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey this week would not affect relations between the two countries.

As well as international affairs, he opined at length on grain production, chess and regional road construction.



Although Putin does take questions on sensitive topics during the sessions, the lack of follow-up questions makes it easy for him to evade giving real answers. When asked whether suspects linked to Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin president, Ramzan Kadyrov, should be called as witnesses in the trial over the killing of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, Putin simply did not answer.

Putin refused to say whether he would stand for president for another six-year term in 2018. He is widely expected to stand and win, which if he saw out the term would mean he had run Russia for 24 years. “I will look at what’s happening in the country and the world … and the decision will be taken about taking part or not in the future elections,” he said.

The world according to Putin

On the evacuation of Aleppo: “It’s the biggest current international humanitarian mission. It couldn’t have been achieved without the active work of the presidents of Turkey and Iran, and our active participation. And of course, as well, the goodwill and work which was carried out by the Syrian president Assad.”

On Russia, Turkey and the fighter jet downed last November: “I was sceptical about the theory that our jet was shot down without orders from the Turkish leadership and it was ordered by people who actually wanted to ruin Russian-Turkish relations. But now, after the attack on our ambassador, I am starting to change my opinion.”

On allegations of a state-sponsored doping programme in sport: “Russia never had any state system of doping or state support for doping. It’s simply impossible, and we will do everything to make sure it doesn’t happen in future.”

On Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director jailed on terrorism charges in a case seen as political: “What should we do if a film director is proven by a court to have been planning acts of terror? Let him go just because he’s a film director?”

On love: [Responding to a voice from the hall asking: “Can I ask you a question about love?”] “Love quickly turns to hatred.”