MOSCOW, March 5. /TASS/. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has declined to compare the severity of crimes targeting minors, a topic Russian President Vladimir Putin put the spotlight on at a meeting with volunteers on Thursday. According to Peskov, transgressions must be punished by the law.
"I cannot talk about the comparability of the order of certain offenses. I can only confirm that this is an offense, and it is punishable by law," he told reporters on Friday when asked to comment on Putin’s scathing remarks against those who make money by encouraging young people to commit suicide or participate in illegal street rallies.
At a meeting with volunteers of the We Are Together campaign, the president said that no one should use children and teenagers as a source of profit. "On the Internet, we are faced with the promotion of child pornography, child prostitution, the distribution of drugs, where the target audience is precisely kids and teenagers, [along with] goading them into the same street to hang out, fight with the police, and then hide behind [those] children," Putin said, adding that "this is the use of children as a tool to achieve someone’s goals." He noted that they "manage to arrange their activities so as to profit off of it all, they post advertisements in addition to other things."