Trump congratulates Putin after election branded a ‘sham’ Critics are condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Sunday victory, but President Donald Trump didn’t mention that, or other alleged Kremlin bad behavior.

President Donald Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin on the Russian president's Sunday election victory and predicted the two men will soon meet in person.

But the White House said Trump did not raise concerns about the widely criticized nature of Putin's win, nor did the U.S. president mention Russian cyber aggression or a recent nerve-agent attack in England that Trump has said Moscow "probably" directed.


During a brief meeting with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump instead described the latest in a series of friendly conversations with the Russian leader, who has assumed villainous status in many Western capitals.

"We had a very good call, and I suspect that we'll probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control," Trump told reporters.

That was an apparent reference to Putin's recent boast that Russia has developed new classes of nuclear weapons that can strike the United States. Trump added that the U.S. would never allow any rival to exceed America's military.

Critics derided Putin's reelection win as only cosmetically democratic. The Russian leader was elected to a third six-year term with about 75 percent of the vote after a campaign in which rival candidates were excluded and even arrested, and during which state-controlled media showered praise on Putin. "Sham elections for a dictator," declared Freedom House, a Washington-based nonpartisan watchdog.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that Trump did not address the nature of Putin’s victory. That drew a sharp retort from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a fierce Putin critic, who said in a statement that “an American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.”

Trump “insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election to determine their country's future, including the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin's regime," McCain added.

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“We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate,” Sanders responded. “What we do know is that Putin has been elected in their country, and that’s not something that we can dictate to them, how they operate. We can only focus on the freeness and fairness of elections in our country.”

That attitude is a departure from decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which a succession of administrations have freely criticized anti-democratic events and elections in other nations.

As recently as March 2017, for example, the State Department issued a statement condemning Putin’s government for cracking down on peaceful anti-Putin protests, which the statement called “an affront to core democratic values.”

However, when Putin was last elected, in 2012 — in another election whose legitimacy was questioned widely — former President Barack Obama personally congratulated his Russian counterpart. A readout of that call similarly made no mention of concerns about the election process. But it also came a moment of far lower U.S.-Russian tensions and well before Putin's campaign of political meddling in the West had begun in earnest.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that Putin’s victory reminded him of “the elections they used to have in almost every communist country where whoever the dictator was at the moment always got a huge percentage of the vote. So calling him wouldn‘t have been high on my list.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) seemed less bothered by the conversation. “I know [Trump has] done the same with numbers of other leaders, as they did when he was elected. I wouldn’t read much into it,” Corker told reporters Tuesday.

But pressed on whether the elections were “free and fair,” Corker replied: “No, absolutely not. I guess we shouldn't call it an election.”

Trump's chat with Putin comes amid recurrent warnings by U.S. intelligence officials that Russia continues to spread digital propaganda and disinformation within the U.S. and is ready to meddle in the 2018 midterm elections. It also came just a few days after the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on Russia to punish 2016 election interference that Putin himself directed, according to an October 2016 intelligence assessment.

Trump did not raise that issue with Putin either, Sanders told reporters Tuesday. “I don’t believe it came up on this specific call, but it is something that we have spoken extensively about,” said Sanders. She added there are currently no specific plans for the time or place of a Trump-Putin meeting.

Nor did Trump address the attempted murder with nerve agent of Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England — an attack that triggered international fury and revulsion toward the Kremlin. Putin's government has denied knowledge of the attempted killing, but Trump himself echoed the British government’s conclusion last week when he said “it looks like the Russians were behind it.”

Sanders did not say why Trump chose not to address the subject, although she did say that "the focus was to talk about shared areas of interest."

Trump said that he and Putin would meet to discuss “Ukraine and Syria and North Korea and various other things,” including what he called a burgeoning arms race. But he was quick to add that, militarily, “we will never allow anybody to have anything even close to what we have.”

Putin announced earlier this month that Russia had developed a new generation of nuclear weapons that are capable of evading U.S. defenses. Most military experts say the weapons do not present a dramatic new threat to the U.S. or significantly alter the strategic balance between the countries, and are largely useful to Putin as domestic showpieces of Russian military prowess.

While Trump has denied any ties to Russia, he has been criticized often for his relatively warm stance toward the Kremlin, especially relative to his otherwise get-tough approach to foreign policy. His 2016 campaign is currently the subject of a Justice Department investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team is probing allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Trump has vehemently denied such allegations and labeled the investigations into his campaign a “witch hunt.”

The Russian government was first to announce the conversation between Trump and Putin. The Kremlin's readout mostly matched the White House’s, but it added that the two leaders discussed the ongoing civil war in Syria and the conflict in Ukraine.

Other Western leaders have congratulated Putin on his election win, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said in a statement that she wished Putin "success in the tasks ahead of you" and said "dialogue" between Germany and Russia is essential.

But Germany's foreign minister said of Putin's reelection, "We certainly cannot talk in all respects about a fair political contest as we know it."

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.