Kremlin confirms Trump secretly sent Covid tests to Putin at peak of pandemic

The Kremlin confirmed on Wednesday that former United States President Donald Trump sent Russian President Vladimir Putin Covid-19 testing kits during the height of the pandemic, as reported by American journalist Bob Woodward in a new book.

“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a written response on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. That the U.S. and Russia exchanged medical equipment during the pandemic was already known.

But Woodward writes in his book that when Trump was still president in 2020, he “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” during a time period when Covid tests were scarce.

Trump denied to ABC news that he sent such Covid test kits to Putin.

In his book, Woodward also claims that the two leaders had spoken by phone several times since Trump left office in 2021 — the Kremlin denied these claims.

“No, [it’s] not true,” Peskov told Russian daily newspaper RBK on Wednesday, referring to the phone calls.

Trump campaign aide Jason Miller on Tuesday also denied these claims, saying that he had never heard of such calls; while Trump’s campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said that none of the stories in the book are true, and called Woodward  an “angry, little man.”