Putin Makes a Splash at the G20 Summit – The New York Times

Mr. Putin, who from time to time underscores in his speech that he is not a prudish man, once joked that communist labor had the same flaw as group sex, as it’s impossible to tell who is working and who is slacking off.

Faced with criticism over human rights abuses in the war in Chechnya early in his tenure, he once threatened at a news conference to castrate a reporter who asked a question about land mine victims.

In opening remarks before a bilateral meeting at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Mr. Trump, speaking with Mr. Putin in a spirit of bonhomie, had commented about reporters, “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

Mr. Putin responded that “it’s the same” in Russia.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the untimely deaths of 58 journalists in Russia in the post-Soviet period, many of them by murder or unexplained accidents.

In a conference call with Russian-based reporters Friday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, clarified that Mr. Putin was not criticizing the liberal political order per se but what he saw as efforts by Western leaders to impose it to the exclusion of other political systems.

“Vladimir Putin, in my understanding, remains very close to the ideas of liberalism,” Mr. Peskov said.

“At the same time, if authoritarianism exists somewhere, this is a question of the people of these countries,” Mr. Peskov said. “We should not judge them and change the regime and government in these countries.”