The Kremlin has brushed aside as potentially fake an audio recording from 2024, released by CNN this week, in which US President Donald Trump recounts how he threatened Russian leader Vladimir Putin that he would “bomb the sh*t out of Moscow” if his forces continued to invade Ukraine.
“I cannot confirm or deny this, even if I wanted to,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday when asked about the recordings. “Whether it is fake or not, we do not know either. There is a lot of fake news these days.”
The remark was part of a series of tapes from Trump’s 2024 fundraisers in New York and Florida, recorded last year and obtained by CNN’s reporters.
“With Putin I said, ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the sh*t out of Moscow. I’m telling you I have no choice,’” Trump is heard saying in the audio obtained by CNN. “And then [Putin] goes, like, ‘I don’t believe you.’
“He said ‘No way’ and I said ‘way’.”
That was just one of two remarks from the West on Wednesday that Peskov was asked about in his regular press conference and found unthreatening.
The same day, the European Convention on Human Rights decided that Russia was guilty of violating multiple articles of the convention in suits launched by Ukraine and the Netherlands.
These cases included the downing of flight MH17, a Malaysian Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile over the Donetsk region in July 2014. All 283 passengers and 15 crew members were killed.
Then-President Petro Poroshenko called the crash the result of an act of terrorism. Several Russian media outlets at the time expressed apologies on behalf of their country to the Netherlands.
That case had been in front of the ECHR since January 2023, and the verdict was handed down on Wednesday.
“This is likely one of the historic moments in the ruling — Russia was found guilty not only of violating the right to life, due to the deaths of innocent people, but also of failing to investigate, showing indifference, and deliberately spreading disinformation,” Dutch lawyer Flip Schüller told Ukrinform.
Peskov was unmoved.
“We are not going to comply,” he said about the ruling. “We consider it null and void. That is all there is to say.”