Putin warned Kremlin pool journalists about wiretapping by American intelligence services

Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference in Goa said that the US National Security Agency was listening to journalists from the Kremlin pool.

“You are part of the presidential pool, and therefore you are carriers of certain information. You can see something, hear something, talk to someone. You freely chat on the phone, on open communications, broadcast everything that you think is necessary, everything that you think or only assume, ”Interfax quotes the president.

“A case can be opened against each of you, for sure it is, and all your negotiations can be tracked. All this is systematized, added up, analyzed, that's what the US NSA does," the president said.

Putin added that the Russian intelligence services “work strictly within the framework of Russian law” and “according to court decisions,” while the American ones “violate even American law.”

Vladimir Putin also said that relations between Russia and the United States deteriorated not because of the situation in Syria, but after the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO forces in 1999. “That's where it all started. I haven't even been president yet. Did I deploy the plane over the Atlantic? This, in my opinion, Primakov did,” he said.

• Relations between Russia and the United States deteriorated in the fall of 2016 amid the failure of the agreed-upon truce in Syria, as well as accusations of Russia in organizing hacker attacks to influence the US elections. In October 2016, President Vladimir Putin announced Russia's withdrawal from the agreement with the United States on disposition of weapons-grade plutonium and called the lifting of US sanctions against the Russian Federation, compensation for damage from sanctions, as well as reducing the presence of NATO troops in Eastern Europe as a condition for the renewal of the agreement.