Putin aide to sue Washington Post
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s economic aide, Kirill Dmitriev, has said he is suing the Washington Post, accusing the newspaper of misquoting him for the second time in two weeks.
Dmitriev previously condemned the outlet for “truth distortion” after it treated a reposted message from another Telegram channel as the Russian official’s own quote in an article published on October 18. The newspaper’s actions were “like blaming users for retweets,” Dmitriev argued. The Post later issued a correction, admitting that an earlier version of its article had an “incorrectly attributed” comment.
On Tuesday, Dmitriev wrote on X that the “fake Washington Post already corrected quotes falsely attributed to me by Moscow bureau chief Robyn Dixon just two weeks ago. Yet sloppy or biased Ms. Dixon at it again –misquoting me in yesterday’s piece.”
He did not provide a link to the article or specify which of his comments he believed had been distorted, but called on the paper to make another correction, apologize, and “finally learn the lesson.”
Dmitriev commented on his own post several hours later, saying the article in question had not been changed.
“We will file a court petition tomorrow. We gave them sufficient time to correct – still not corrected,” he wrote.
In her piece on Monday, Dixon described Dmitriev’s visit to America last week, which he undertook after the cancelation of the Budapest summit on settling the Ukraine conflict scheduled between Putin and US President Donald Trump.
Dixon reported that in Dmitriev’s interviews during the trip he insisted that the latest sanctions on Russia would not harm its economy and would only cause a spike in fuel prices in the US. She also reported that he had rejected accusations of the Russian military attacking civilian targets in Ukraine, and that he had “claimed that a diplomatic solution to the war was reasonably close.”
Speaking about his visit on Sunday, Dmitriev said his delegation had “clearly” communicated to the US side “that only constructive, respectful dialogue will bear fruit. Any attempts to pressure Russia are simply pointless.” The aide also reiterated Moscow’s stance that the Ukraine conflict can be resolved only through “eradicating its root causes.”
