Q I want to follow up on the accusations of fraud in the Russian election. Why does the United States government not believe that it should criticize Russia for these accusations, which have been brought up by the OSCE and UK government directly in a statement? You know, they’re listing things like restrictions on fundamental freedoms and lack of access for opposition candidates. I mean, why doesn’t the President or the White House believe that’s something that they should be discussing with the Russian leader?
MS. SANDERS: I didn’t say that we couldn’t discuss it with the Russian leader. I said it didn’t come up on today’s call. Again, the focus was to talk about areas of shared interest. We know that we need to continue a dialogue. It’s important for a lot of the safety and security of people across the globe. We would like to be able to work with them on things like North Korea, on Iran, and also, both countries’ shared interest in lowering the tensions when it comes to an arms race, recognizing that that’s not the best thing for either country. And so we want to be able to have those conversations. And that was the point of today’s call.
Q Does the White House believe that the election in Russia was free and fair?
MS. SANDERS: Look, in terms of the election there, we’re focused on our elections. We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate. What we do know is that Putin has been elected in their country, and that’s not something that we can dictate to them how they operate. We can only focus on the freeness and the fairness of our elections, something we 100 percent fully support and something we’re going to continue to do everything we can to protect to make sure bad actors don’t have the opportunity to impact them in any way.
Не надеялся дожить до такого: США больше не борются за демократию и права человека. По крайней мере, не на территории Российской Федерации.