{"id":22868,"date":"2015-12-18T09:02:33","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T17:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/putin-praises-trump-as-bright-talented\/"},"modified":"2015-12-18T09:02:33","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T17:02:33","slug":"putin-praises-trump-as-bright-talented","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/putin-praises-trump-as-bright-talented\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin praises Trump as ‘bright, talented’"},"content":{"rendered":"

MOSCOW<\/strong> \u2014 In Vladimir Putin\u2019s view, Donald Trump is \u201cbright and talented.\u201d But as much as those words sound overtly like praise, there are some murky nuances.<\/p>\n

The most unequivocally favorable part of the comments the Russian leader made Thursday to a scrum of reporters after his annual year-end news conference was about the Republican presidential aspirant\u2019s claims that he wants to improve relations with Russia.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe says that he wants to move to another, closer level of relations. Can we really not welcome that? Of course we welcome that,\u201d Putin said.<\/p>\n

Trump hasn\u2019t given details about he would go about achieving that, relying instead on his fireproof self-regard.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that I would probably get along with him very well,\u201d Trump said in an October interview with CBS.<\/p>\n

Putin \u201cdoes not like Obama at all. He doesn\u2019t respect Obama at all. And I\u2019m sure that Obama doesn\u2019t like him very much,\u201d Trump had said.<\/p>\n

Russia-U.S. relations have hit a particularly low point during the Obama administration, with the Kremlin persistently alleging that Washington\u2019s pressure on Moscow over human rights and the sanctions imposed over Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine are a cover for fomenting unrest aimed at driving Putin out of office.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose (Putin) sympathizes with Trump without knowing him well in person, but he is following him closely, what he does and says, just because he is not a kind of usual Western politician,\u201d said Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.<\/p>\n

While the Obama administration regarded Russia\u2019s airstrikes in Syria gingerly, Trump was a full-throated supporter \u2014 even if Moscow has appeared to be more interested in helping prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad than fighting militants from the Islamic State group in the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Putin wants to go and knock the hell out of ISIS, I am all for it, 100 percent, and I can\u2019t understand how anybody would be against it,\u201d he said during a Republican presidential debate.<\/p>\n

Putin assessed Trump as \u201cthe absolute leader in the American presidential race,\u201d suggesting his comments could be an early attempt to curry favor with a man he may have to deal with.<\/p>\n

Does Putin think Trump is intelligent?<\/p>\n

On that count, the Russian word he used not only means \u201cbright\u201d in terms of intelligence, but also \u201cvivid\u201d and even \u201cgaudy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not our affair to determine his worthiness, that\u2019s a matter for the American voters,\u201d Putin said.<\/p>\n

He also hedged on Trump\u2019s penchant for blunt language that provokes both devotion and revulsion.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis turn of phrase, which he uses to raise his popularity,\u201d is a domestic U.S. political matter, Putin said.<\/p>\n

Trump said in a statement that he was honored by the comments.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,\u201d he said. \u201cI have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putin himself is not opposed to being blunt or vulgar to make a point, at one point vowing to wipe out Chechen rebels even if they had to be shot \u201cin the outhouse,\u201d and another time suggesting a reporter who questioned his Chechen policy should get circumcised.<\/p>\n

Putin and Trump also share a love of the limelight, although Putin\u2019s public appearances generally have an element of control and calculation at odds with Trump\u2019s apparent hair-trigger outbursts.<\/p>\n

The Russian president is famed for public stunts, including swimming in a frigid river and riding a horse bare-chested, that emphasize his athleticism \u2014 a more-convincing strategy than a superlatives-dripping letter from a physician that Trump issued this month.<\/p>\n

Trump has repeatedly cited the fact that two appeared \u2014 in separate segments \u2014 on the same episode of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d as evidence of their bond.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got to know him very well because we were both on \u201860 Minutes,\u2019 we were stable mates, and we did very well that night,\u201d he said in the fourth GOP debate, touting the show\u2019s ratings.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press Writer Jill Colvin in Newark, New Jersey, contributed to this story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MOSCOW \u2014 In Vladimir Putin\u2019s view, Donald Trump is \u201cbright and talented.\u201d But as much as those words sound overtly like praise, there are some murky nuances. The most unequivocally favorable part of the comments the Russian leader made Thursday to a scrum of reporters after his annual year-end news<\/a> conference was about the Republican […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22868"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}