Trump and Putin, a budding ‘bro-mance?’

Putin dodged a question about the abusive language and combative ploys that Trump uses to stay atop the polls, saying “it’s not our place to judge his work”.

“I have always felt that Russian Federation 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”.

“That would be risky”, Putin said.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has crudely rebuffed talk of a rapprochement with Turkey and given a first veiled admission that Moscow’s operatives have been deployed to the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine.

Turkey has said the Russian jet strayed into its airspace and ignored repeated warnings, but Moscow insists it never left Syrian territory.

As for the Putin-Trump parallels, is anyone really surprised that the two would admire each other from afar?

In his annual news conference with hundreds of Russian and foreign journalists, Mr Putin also found time to suggest that beleaguered Fifa football chief Sepp Blatter deserved a Nobel Prize, and lavished praise on controversial United States tycoon and Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

One of Mr Trump’s fiercest rivals, Mr Jeb Bush, said Mr Putin’s support for him was evidence that Mr Trump is like Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state who was part of Mr Obama’s early attempts to improve relations with Russian Federation. He doesn’t respect Obama at all. “He says that he wants to move to another level relations, a deeper level of relations with Russia”, Putin said. “I will get along – I think – with Putin, and I will get along with others, and we will have a much more stable – stable world”, Mr Trump said. “But I think that I would probably get along with him very well”.

“What else can we do but to welcome it?” Of course not! For the rest of us, though, it does provide a certain amount of entertainment value. Maybe, they thought that we would run away from there (Syria)? Trump said, despite USA wariness of Russia’s presence in Syria, which is mainly aimed at bolstering the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, who the Obama administration has called for to leave.