Vladimir Putin has dismissed the dossier published last week about alleged links between Moscow and Donald Trump, describing the people who ordered it as “worse than prostitutes”.
Making his first public remarks on the claims three days before Trump’s inauguration as US president, Putin joked about Russian sex workers, who he said were “the best in the world”, but said he did not believe Trump would have met any.
The dossier investigated the US president-elect’s alleged ties with Russia and contained lurid allegations that he had potentially been compromised by the Russians during trips to Moscow.
A former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, compiled the dossier as research for Trump’s opponents during the US election campaign. On Tuesday Steele was denounced as a “fugitive crook from MI6” by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
In a sometimes bizarre speech in Moscow that echoed some of the more salacious language in the documents, the Russian president said that any allegation that Trump was essentially a Russian intelligence asset was nonsense.
“I’ve never met him. I don’t know what he’ll do on the world stage. So I have no reason either to criticise him, or to defend him,” said Putin, who has previously expressed admiration for Trump’s stated desire to improve relations with Russia.
Putin dismissed as an “obvious fake” the idea that Trump could have been compromised during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe competition.
“This is an adult, and a man who for years organised beauty contests and spoke with the most beautiful women in the world. I can hardly believe that he ran off to meet with our girls of low social morals. Although of course ours are the best in the world,” said Putin.
“The people who order these fakes which are being spread against the president-elect of America and use them in the political battle are worse than prostitutes. They have no moral limits,” the Russian president added.
Putin said it was absurd to think Russian special services would be interested in Trump given that at the time he was not involved in politics. “When Trump came to Moscow he was not a political figure, he was just a businessman, one of the rich people of America. Do they think our special services follow every American billionaire?”
In fact, Russian security services have a long history of obtaining and releasing compromising footage of a range of people, from Russian opposition politicians to western diplomats.
Steele has been described by colleagues as well-sourced and credible, though it is believed he did not travel to Russia to conduct the research. Many analysts have questioned the plausibility of a western intelligence operative being able to source so many explosive allegations. However, the dossier has added to unease about the praise showered on Putin by Trump, the links to Russia among many in his entourage, and the apparent activities of Russian hackers during the election campaign.
US intelligence agencies believe Russian military intelligence hacked the Democratic party’s servers during the election campaign and passed the emails to WikiLeaks, possibly using an intermediary. Lavrov, during his annual press conference on Tuesday, denied that Russian hackers had targeted the US election or planned to target European elections in future.
“It’s not for me to prove any of this is false,” the foreign minister said. “As far as I know there is a presumption of innocence, so it’s up to you to prove it’s true.”
A report issued by US intelligence agencies said they had “high confidence” that Russian military intelligence was behind the hacking, but provided no evidence in the unclassified version.
Russia, said Lavrov, stands for “pragmatism and national interests understood in a sensible way, and not messianic foreign policy and the attempt to spread values across the world”. He expressed hope that under Trump, US foreign policy would move closer towards Russia’s ideal, and noted that in prioritising domestic business interests and the fight against terrorism, Trump’s stated foreign policy priorities were “exactly what Putin sees as the priorities for Russian foreign policy”.
However, Lavrov denied reports that a summit between Trump and Putin was scheduled to take place in his first weeks as US president, potentially in Reykjavik, Iceland. “It is not true, and there has been no contact to discuss such plans,” he said.
The foreign minister did confirm that officials from the Trump administration had been invited to participate in Syria peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, next week, and said Russia wanted to work with the new US government on global issues.
One of the last acts of Barack Obama’s administration with regards to Russia was to expel 35 of its diplomats from the US in response to the hacking allegations. Putin said he would not retaliate as he hoped for better relations with a Trump White House, leading the president-elect to call Putin “very smart”.
Previously, US officials have complained about an unprecedented level of harassment from Russian authorities, including home break-ins, being followed and intimidation.
Lavrov denied this on Tuesday, and said US spies were using diplomatic cover for activity within Russia, employing wigs, fake eyebrows and occasionally cross-dressing in their attempts to avoid detection. Lavrov claimed US diplomats in disguise had been spotted at opposition protests and that they used hire cars, rather than diplomatic vehicles, to drive around the country in the hope of avoiding detection.
He also claimed American counterintelligence had been more active in recent years in its attempts to recruit Russian diplomats based in the US as double agents. He alleged that one diplomat had been approached with an attempt to turn him while picking up medicines from a doctor’s surgery, while another had $10,000 (£8,200) in cash placed in his car by US agents as an offer to begin cooperation.
