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Trump had a chummy call with Putin and didn't mention the poisoned spy

“In general, the conversation was constructive, businesslike and focused on overcoming the accumulated problems in Russian-American relations.”

U.S. President Donald Trump called Vladimir Putin to congratulate the Russian leader on his victory in Sunday’s presidential election and discuss setting up a face-to-face meeting, both the Kremlin and the White House said Tuesday, despite reports of widespread irregularities in the Russian vote.

The call — which the Kremlin described as “constructive” and Trump called “very good” — comes less than a week after the U.S. joined NATO allies Britain, France, and Germany in a joint statement declaring Moscow “highly likely” to have used a rare chemical weapon to try to assassinate former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal on British soil on March 4.

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Trump, speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, confirmed many of the details first released by the Kremlin.

“I had a call with President Putin and congratulated him on the victory, his electoral victory,” Trump told reporters. “The call had to do, also, with the fact that we will probably get together in the not-too-distant future so that we can discuss arms, we can discuss the arms race. As you know, he made a statement that being in an arms race is not a great thing, that was right after the election, one of the first statements he made. And we are spending $700 billion this year on our military, and a lot of it is that we are going to remain stronger than any other nation in the world, by far.”

Trump’s statement dovetailed with the Kremlin’s account, which described the two presidents holding a wide-ranging discussion over a long list of issues including Ukraine, Syria, North Korea, “the energy sphere,” and ways to limit the arms race. The Kremlin statement made no mention of the Skripal poisoning, which U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has called “a barbaric act.” And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian newswire Interfax that the Skripal issue indeed never came up.

The joint letter endorsed by the U.S. and its allies last week called the Skripal poisoning “an assault on U.K. sovereignty” that “threatens the security of us all,” and called on Russia to “uphold international peace and security.” And though Trump largely kept out of the diplomatic row, he weighed in last Thursday, saying, “It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it,” and that his administration was “taking it very seriously.”

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The drama did prove beneficial to Putin, however, according to one of his own media handlers. On Sunday evening Putin's campaign spokesman thanked Britain for inspiring voter turnout. “They put pressure on us at the exact moment when we needed to mobilize,“ Andrei Kondrashov told Russian media.

READ: Don’t expect a fourth term to make Putin any friendlier to the West

Indeed, Putin has cast himself as a powerful leader standing up to aggressive Western powers, and his pitch for re-election to a fourth term frequently referenced Russia’s hostile relations with the West — such as in a speech when Putin unveiled “invincible” nuclear weapons, or when authorities moved the official date of the election to the anniversary of Russia’s seizure of the region of Crimea from Ukraine.

The Kremlin said the two sides also discussed the change in leadership at the State Department, where Trump recently fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and announced CIA Director Mike Pompeo would soon be taken over.

A State Department spokesperson who asked not to be named declined to comment on the call directly. Asked about the freeness and fairness of Putin’s re-election, the spokesperson pointed to an earlier statement by the White House Deputy Spokesperson Hogan Gidley, who “addressed this by saying we are not surprised by the outcome,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t have anything to add.”

Several observers have called Putin’s re-election victory Sunday fraught with violations. The election monitoring group Golos said it received 2,972 complaints, and observers closely monitoring web-streamed security camera footage of polling stations shared clips on social media that appeared to show ballot stuffing.

Republican Senator John McCain issued a sharply worded statement criticizing Trump for congratulating Putin on the election.

“An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” McCain said. “And by doing so with Vladimir Putin, President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election.”

Cover image: Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and U.S. President Donald Trump talk as they arrive for the family photo session during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Danang, Vietnam, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)