ST. PETERSBURG, June 17. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes Donald Trump’s declared readiness to mend relations with Russia.
"What I’ve certainly paid attention to and welcomed is Mr. Trump’s statement he is prepared for the full format restoration of Russian-US relations. Is there anything bad about that? We welcome this," Putin said at the full-scale meeting of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in reply to questions from the moderator.
"When they are through with the election process, we will do business with any US president," Putin said adding he hoped the new person in the White House would wish to develop Russian-US relations.
Putin recalled that Russia never intervened in the internal political processes in other countries.
"The United States lectures one and all on the right way to live. Also, it lectures others on democracy. But do you really think that the election of the US president is a democratic procedure? On two occasions in US history the president was elected by a majority of the electoral college members though that majority of electors represented a minority of the voters. Is this what you call democracy?" Putin said.
Whenever discussions on that score happen with US counterparts, he continued, we often hear in reply, "Don’t you meddle in this, this is our business, we are in the habit of having it this way."
"If so, please don’t you intervene in what is not your business, too. Put your own affairs in order first," he said.