MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared on Tuesday that the political memo alleging that the Kremlin had sought for years to influence President-elect Donald Trump was “fake,’’ and he said that the effort to compile such a dossier was further evidence of the political decay of the West — one of the Russian leader’s favorite themes.
Speaking at a news conference, Putin also accused the departing Obama administration of trying to undermine Trump, saying that Russian spies had better things to do than chase rich American businessmen and try to catch them in compromising situations.
“These bogus stories are clearly fake,’’ Putin said of allegations that included Trump cavorted with prostitutes while visiting Russia.
“He is a grown man, somebody who for many years has been organizing beauty contests, interacted with the most beautiful women in the world,’’ he added. “You know, it is difficult for me to imagine that he ran to a hotel to meet with our young women with lowered social responsibility.’’
While denouncing prostitution as a “horrible social phenomenon,’’ Putin also boasted about Russian exceptionalism, adding: “Even though they are undoubtedly the best in the world, too. I doubt that Trump would go for that.’’
There is a frenzy of attention in Russia focused on the change in administration in Washington, even by the standards of state-run television, which generally devotes more time covering the United States than it does the rest of the world.
Rossiya 24, a round-the-clock cable news station, is broadcasting a countdown to Trump’s inauguration on Friday, featuring a new segment every day that highlights some slice of the president-elect’s biography. “News of the Week,’’ Russian state television’s flagship program, devoted most of its 2 1/2-hour show Sunday night to bashing the Obama administration and lauding the pending Trump presidency.
The tone of some of the public statements in Russia has been gleeful. “January 20 will be a historical day,’’ said Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and an outspoken ally of Putin. “I ask everyone to shave themselves, put on their best suits, sit down to tables at 8 p.m. and lift a glass of champagne.’’
Other public figures were more sober. Sergey Stankevich, the head of the international affairs committee for the Party of Growth, another political party, said that Trump might prove to be “no picnic’’ and that someone predictable like Hillary Clinton might have been better for Russia.
Putin adopted a “wait-and-see attitude’’ toward a Trump administration after dismissing the unsubstantiated memo released last week that suggested Russia had been gathering salacious material about Trump for years, including filming a purported encounter with prostitutes at a luxurious Moscow hotel in 2013. Trump has called the accusations false.
Russia had no reason to pursue Trump when he visited Moscow, Putin said.
“At the time, he was not a political figure, we didn’t even know about his political ambitions, simply a businessman, one of the rich Americans,’’ the Russian president said in what seemed to be a carefully worded response to a reporter’s question. “Do people really think that our special services are chasing every American billionaire? This is complete nonsense.’’
Analysts of Russia have suggested that the Kremlin does just that, cultivating ties with individuals it believes might be important in the future and collecting information about their private lives — known in Russian as “kompromat,’’ or compromising material. Some Russian opposition figures have been publicly shamed after being caught on camera engaging in extramarital sex in hotel rooms, and during the era of the Soviet Union, the intelligence agencies regularly targeted foreigners in an effort to collect evidence of embarrassing behavior.
Putin called the memo another sign of a crumbling West.
“The fact that such methods are used against the elected US president is a unique case,’’ Putin said. “This demonstrates a serious degradation of the political elites in the West, including in the US.’’
While expressing hopes that a Trump administration would repair ties with Russia and balance relations with Europe through “common sense,’’ Putin said that the new president’s agenda was unclear: “Look, I never met Mr. Trump, I don’t know what he will do on the international arena.’’
Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, also dismissed the memo as an invention, calling the former British spy who wrote it “some runaway crook from MI-6.’’
