Putin hints at holding power past 2024, defends Trump
Just hours after President Donald Trump became only the third U.S. leader to be impeached, President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Thursday mocked what he described as an attempt by Democrats to reverse the 2016 election and hinted that he could, himself, stay in power for many more years.
Taking questions for more than four hours at his annual end- of- year news conference, the Russian president embraced Republican talking points, deriding the impeachment process in Washington as baseless and destined to fail.
“This is nothing but a continuation of an internal political struggle, with the party that lost the election, the Democratic Party, trying to reach its goal by different means,” Putin said during the 15th edition of the news conference, a wellworn ritual that the president uses to parade his mastery of domestic policy detail and take swipes at political tumult overseas.
Putin was far less emphatic in his take on Russia’s own political affairs, particularly its next presidential election in 2024. He sidestepped a direct question about his future plans, while raising the possibility that Russia’s Constitution, which bars him from seeking another term, might be changed.
Moscow has been abuzz for months with speculation about whether Putin, who has been in power for 20 years, will step down at the end of his current and supposedly final term in 2024.
Putin has kept his plans secret.
His musing publicly about revising the constitution, which bars a president from serving more than two successive terms, raised the possibility that he may want to run for a third consecutive term — which would keep him in office through 2030 — and possibly more. But it could also mean that he wants to remove only the reference to consecutive terms, which would actually strengthen the twoterm limit.
Putin used a question from Dimitri Simes, a Russian-born American expert on Russia, to riff about U.S. politics.
U. S. intelligence agencies declared in January 2017 that Putin had personally ordered an “influence campaign” to tilt the 2016 vote in Trump’s favor, an assessment that both Putin and Trump have repeatedly rejected.
“First they accuse Trump of a collusion with Russia. Then it turns out there was no collusion, so this cannot be used as a basis for impeachment,” Putin said. “Now they’ve come up with the idea he put pressure on Ukraine.”