Senator John McCain has taken to the web pages of Pravda.ru to tell

Russians their ruler is corrupt, repressive and violent, in a

blistering riposte to Vladimir Putin's commentary last week in the New York Times.

The veteran US senator and former presidential candidate used almost

every line of his article for the Pravda.ru website to blast Putin for human rights abuse, cronyism and election-rigging, as well as foreign policy.

The tit-for-tat editorials come just after a temporary thaw in the deep freeze of US-Russian relations with a bilateral agreement on disarming Syria of its chemical weapons on Saturday, but that agreement is already fraying over differences on how it should be implemented.

While Putin used his editorial to present the US administration as war-mongers and himself as a peacemaker in Syria, McCain sought to

paint the Russian leader as "supporting a Syrian regime that is murdering tens of thousands of its own people to remain in power and by blocking the United Nations from even condemning its atrocities."

"He is not enhancing Russia's global reputation. He is destroying it. He has made her a friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed, and untrusted by nations that seek to build a safer, more peaceful and prosperous world," the senator writes.

Putin's column has also been criticised as hypocritical by Human Rights Watch, which pointed out that Russia is the main supplier of arms to the Syrian regime.



A report by Oxfam on Thursday revealed that Russia was contributing 3% of its fair share to a UN fund for responding the Syrian humanitarian crisis.

McCain's broadside against Putin also focused on human rights by Putin's government. Noting that he had been invited to write by Pravda.ru's editor as "an active anti-Russian politician", he insisted: "I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today."

He added that Putin and his associates "punish dissent and imprison

opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They

harass, threaten, and banish organisations that defend your right to

self-governance. To perpetuate their power they foster rampant

corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorise and even

assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption."

Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian president would read the article but would not respond. "We will definitely read it," Peskov told Russian media. "McCain is well known for not being a fan of Putin. It's unlikely we will enter a polemic, as this is the view of a person who lives across the ocean. As for what Russians deserve, they can answer this question for themselves and do so when there are elections."

McCain's choice of website has historical resonance. Pravda was the Soviet Union's state newspaper, but the Pravda.ru news website was set up after the famous paper was dissolved and sold off in the wake of the collapse of communism.

The website is now in an acrimonious dispute about who is the "real" Pravda with a printed title, which is still the official paper of Russia's Communist party.

Neither outlet has much of a readership, and Russian analysts noted that there were any number of more appropriate venues in modern Russia that McCain's could have selected for his column.

"McCain rebutting Putin via Pravda? He is really stuck in 1980s," wrote Dmitry Trenin, Director of the Moscow Carnegie Centre on Twitter. "I only realised that Pravda still existed when they accepted McCain's offer."