Putin tests West’s sanctions resolve on visit to Slovenia

“What I think unites Putin and Trump is an extremely cynical look at the world and the human condition, and I think this could, forgive me the pun, trump any other disagreements they may have”, he says.

Trump’s initial statement on the emails came on the third day of the Democratic National Convention, which opened amid a scandal involving the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers.

“I would treat Vladimir Putin firmly but there’s nothing that I can think of that I’d rather do than have Russian Federation friendly – as opposed to the way they are right now – so that we can go and knock out ISIS together along with other people and with other countries”, he said.

The Justice Department declined to prosecute Clinton over her email practices.

MR DONALD TRUMP, the Republican presidential candidate, referring to messages on Mrs Hillary Clinton’s server that she did not release to investigators.

Slovenia, a small Alpine nation where U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s wife Melania was born and grew up, has kept friendly relations with Russian Federation even as it joined European Union sanctions against Moscow for its 2014 military takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and support for insurgents in eastern Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Trump slammed Sony for getting hacked in 2014.

So in one careless comment, Mr. Trump signalled a radical break on a crucial matter of USA foreign policy about which he appears to have given no thought.

On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said accusations of a Russian hand in hacking Democratic Party emails bordered on “total stupidity” and were motivated by anti-Russian sentiment. Those emails showed that party staff members supported Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her Democratic challenger, and his disappointed supporters. “But you have 33,000 e-mails deleted, and the real problem is what was said in those e-mails from the Democratic National Committee”.

Trump, whose wife Melania was born in the town of Sevnica while Slovenia was still part of Communist-run Yugoslavia, has sided with Putin on a wide range of issues, including saying that, if elected, he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and would not necessarily back North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members if Putin chose to invade.

Peskov said Russian Federation carefully avoids any words or actions that could be interpreted as interfering in the electoral process. “We would be looking at that”, he said. In an interview with The New York Times last week, Trump said he would decide whether to protect the Baltic states against Russian aggression based on whether those countries “have fulfilled their obligations to us”.

“Cyberattacks by foreign governments such as Russian Federation and China against US industry, government and other sensitive targets are unacceptable and must be resisted”, the Post editorial board wrote Wednesday.

This runs counter to the position of the Obama administration and the European Union, which have imposed punishing sanctions on Russian Federation in response to the annexation. Even Belarus, Russia’s closest ally and neighbor, did not recognize the annexation.

The Journal anxious, too, about Trump’s apparent empathy for Putin’s authoritarian ways, condemning the GOP nominee for saying that he likes Putin’s “ability to get his way”.