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Then-president Donald Trump secretly sent COVID-19 test kits to Vladimir Putin in 2020, despite a United States shortage during the pandemic and spoke multiple times with the Russian leader after leaving office, according to a new book by Bob Woodward.
Background: In excerpts of the explosive book published on Tuesday by The Washington Post, where Woodward is an associate editor, he says Trump retains a personal relationship with Putin even as he campaigns for another term and the Russian president conducts a war against US ally Ukraine.
With the coronavirus ravaging the world in 2020, Trump sent a batch of test kits to his counterpart in Moscow. Putin accepted the supplies but sought to avoid political fallout for Trump, urging him not to disclose the dispatch of medical equipment, the book says.
Key Quote: According to Woodward, Putin told Trump: “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
What else to know: Woodward has chronicled American presidencies for 50 years, and this is his fourth book since Trump’s upset victory in 2016. He began his presidential reportages with Richard Nixon, who was undone by the 1970s Watergate scandal exposed by Woodward and Post colleague Carl Bernstein.
What comes next: “War” is set for publication on 15 October, just three weeks before a critical US election in which Trump is locked in a tight race against vice president Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
The Trump campaign dismissed the book as “made-up stories”.
They are “the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” spokesman Steven Cheung told AFP.