"Draw Your Conclusions": U.S. Says Will Skip Putin Inauguration Today

The United States said on Monday it will skip Vladimir Putin’s swearing-in ceremony in Russia, TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.

"We will not have a representative at his inauguration... You can draw your own conclusions," Matthew Miller, State Department spokesperson, told a daily briefing.

"We certainly did not consider that election free and fair but he is the president of Russia and he is going to continue in that capacity," Miller said when asked by TURAN whether Washington considered Putin as a legitimate president.

The Kremlin in March claimed Putin's "landslide victory" in a presidential election for his fifth term, just weeks after his most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, died in jail.

A senior Kremlin official was quoted by Russian media on Monday as saying the heads of all the foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow had been invited to attend today's inauguration.

The EU over the weekend announced that the bloc's ambassador to Moscow would not attend the ceremony, in keeping with the position of most of the bloc's member states. In the meantime, about seven EU member states are reportedly expected to send a representative, according to media reports.

The inauguration comes about 2.5 years after Putin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a Monday statement that Kyiv "sees no legal grounds" for recognising Putin as the democratically elected and legitimate president.

Today's ceremony, Ukraine said, sought to create "the illusion of legality for the nearly lifelong stay in power of a person who has turned the Russian Federation into an aggressor state and the ruling regime into a dictatorship."