Twenty-four hours after defending his enduring admiration for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin before a room full of United States military veterans, Donald Trump took to Putin’s own TV network to dismiss speculation that the Kremlin was behind the recent hacking attack against the Democratic Party.

“I think it is probably unlikely. I think maybe that the Democrats are putting that out. Who knows?” Trump said on RT America when asked by Politicking host Larry King to comment on whether he thought Russia had launched a “covert operation to disrupt the 2016 election” in Putin’s favor. “I hope that if they are doing something, I hope that somebody is going to be able to find out so that they can end it because that would not be appropriate at all,” the Republican nominee added.

Throughout the election, Trump has pushed a decidedly pro-Russia platform and has on multiple occasions argued in favor of thawing relations with Putin, worrying both foreign policy experts and members of his own party. “Vladimir Putin is an aggressor who does not share our interests,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said curtly Thursday, adding that it “certainly appears that he is conducting state-sponsored cyberattacks on our political system.” Putin, for his part, has characterized the recent cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee—which resulted in the release of 20,000 private e-mails, leading to the resignation of chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz—as a public service, even as he denied the Kremlin’s involvement. “Listen does it even matter who hacked this data?” the Russian president asked in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “The important thing is that the content was given to the public.”

During the telephone interview, which aired on Thursday night, Trump was ambivalent when King asked if he took a similar position. “I don’t have any opinion on it. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who hacked. I’m not sure. Who hacked?” he said. “Who did the hacking? I have absolutely no opinion on that,” Trump asserted, despite his earlier suggestion that Russian hackers should release Clinton’s e-mails.

Trump’s interview with King on RT America, a subsidiary of the government-backed news outlet RT (formerly Russia Today), comes one day after the nominee declared at the NBC News Commander-in-Chief forum on Wednesday night that Putin has “been a leader far more than [Barack Obama] has been a leader” with “very strong control over a country.” And while Jason Miller, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told CNN that the G.O.P. nominee was unaware that the conversation would appear on RT, and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said they though the interview with King was for his podcast, Trump’s appearance on the government-controlled news outlet does little to quell concerns that Trump’s judgement is clouded by his worrisome obsession with the former K.G.B. officer.