American billionaire Robert Kraft's story that Russian President Vladimir Putin stole his Super Bowl ring in 2005 was a joke. This was reported on the evening of June 16 on the website of the National Football League of the United States with reference to the official representative of the New England Patriots football club, Stacy James, owned by Kraft.

“This is a funny story that Kraft told again for laughs,” said a club representative, emphasizing that Kraft respects Russia and Vladimir Putin personally and is glad that the ring is kept in the Moscow Kremlin. James also suggested that the New England Patriots had fan clubs in Russia thanks to the ring incident.

Earlier on June 16, press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said that Putin was ready to buy Kraft a new ring to replace the lost one. The statement was made in response to the publication in the New York tabloid New York Post, and then in a number of other media outlets, of new details about the theft of the ring, which the press secretary called “unimaginable.” In particular, Kraft’s explanations about the pressure on him from the American authorities, who allegedly sought to hush up the scandal, Peskov declared “a matter of a detailed conversation with psychoanalysts.”

A Super Bowl ring with diamonds worth about $25,000 ended up in Putin's hands in 2005 after a meeting with Kraft and other representatives of American business in St. Petersburg. Soon after the event, American journalists suspected that the billionaire did not intend to give the president a ring and Putin himself took it after trying it on. Kraft soon released a statement claiming that the ring was indeed a gift.

The story about the ring stolen by Putin was declared a joke