Boston tragedy prompts Moscow, Washington to fight common threats together - Putin
MOSCOW. April 25 (Interfax-AVN) - President Vladimir Putin hopes that the Boston terror attack will bring together Russia and the United States in the fight against common threats, among them terrorism.
"I simply urge this tragedy to bring us together in the suppression of joint threats, one of which, the most dangerous, is terrorism. If we really pool efforts, we will not miss such strikes and bear such losses," the president said in the Direct Line on Thursday.
"Russia itself is a victim of international terrorism. It is one of the first victims. I have always been indignant when our Western partners and your colleagues from the Western media called our terrorists, who committed barbarian, bloody and disgusting crimes on the territory of our country, no other than "insurgents" and practically never called them terrorists," he said.
Western countries rendered information, financial and political support to the extremists, Putin indicated. "Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly but their activity on the Russian territory has always been supported," Putin noted.
"We have always said that instead of declaring terrorism as a common threat it is necessary to take measures and cooperate closely with each other. Now these two criminals [the Tsarnayev brothers] are the best confirmation to the correctness of our thesis," he said.
In the opinion of the president, terrorist acts of the Boston kind are not a consequence of ethnic or religious problems. "This is not the question of nationality or religion. We have said that a thousand times. The thing is the extremist feelings of these people," the head of state affirmed.
"And what they have come to, certainly not the U.S. administration but still U.S. politicians, they want to declare the surviving criminal [Dzhokhar Tsarnayev] a prisoner of war. They must be out of their mind. What prisoner of war? Has the civil war between the North and the South resumed? That is absurd, they simply talk rubbish," Putin said with indignation.