Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual year-end press conference with local and international journalists Friday in Moscow.



When asked about his alleged role in the American presidential election by BBC's Msocow correspondent, Putin said: "The losing side always tries to pass the buck. They need to learn to lose with dignity."



Later, Putin slammed the American Democratic Party, saying: "The current administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party are trying to blame all their failures on external factors... (We are talking about) a party which has clearly forgotten the original meaning of its own name... It is a humiliation."



Selected quotes (translated from Russian by RT):





VLADIMIR PUTIN: The currently-ruling party in the US, until January 20, which has been called Democratic, they have clearly forgotten the essence of their name; what it means to be democratic. And they have used administrative resources without shame to call on the eletoral delegates to disobey decisions made by the voters. It's bad, I have already discussed that. I hope that as soon as all the pre-election flames die down, American society, and the US is a great country, will figure it out and draw all the necessary conclusions for future electoral campaigns...



The outgoing administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party of the United States are trying to offload responsibility for all the failures on external factors. In this regard, I have a question and some ideas. We know that the Democratic Party lost not only the presidential election, but also the election to the Senate, where the Republicans have a majority. Is that also the result of our or my personal work?



The fact that many Republican voters support the Russian president, I don't take this on my account. You know what I'm thinking about in this regards? I think that it means that some considerable part of the American public share our view on world order, what we should do, what are our mutual challenges and problems. It's good that there are people who are sympathetic to our views on traditional values because that's a good basis to build relations between such world powers as Russia and the United States...



It is now hard to say, the US President-elect needs time to form his team, without this unprepared meetings are impractical. What kind of questions will we discuss? Questions related to the normalisation of our relations. After all, Mr. Trump during the election campaign said that he believed it would be right to normalise Russian-American ties and he said that it could not be any worse, because it was impossible for them to get worse. I agree with him. We will think together how to improve them...



However I would very like to build constructive relations with the president-elect as well as the future leadership of the Democratic Party for the benefit of the United States and the Russian Federation as well as the peoples of the two states.