Kremlin: US ‘working crudely’ to interfere in Russian affairs

A spokesman for the Kremlin on Monday said that the U.S. government was “crudely” trying to recruit Russians to be informants and that those efforts demonstrate that the U.S. was trying to interfere in Russian internal affairs.

“The fact is that the United States in recent years is working crudely using its intelligence services, trying to recruit Russian citizens, exerting moral and other pressure on them … I think these incidents in the most eloquent manner testify to the attempts to interfere in Russia’s internal affairs,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on a conference call, according to a Reuters report. 

{mosads}Peskov’s comments came when he was asked about a New York Times report that the FBI and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried from 2014 to 2016 to get Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to be an informant.

The Times said that the effort to make Deripaska a source was part of a broader effort to look into seeing if some of Russia’s wealthiest men would cooperate with the U.S. government. The government’s efforts appear to have failed.