The Kremlin has denied that Vladimir Putin personally chose a particularly attractive interpreter to sidetrack ex-president Donald Trump at a 2019 meeting.
The extraordinary claim is from former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in a forthcoming publication.
The interpreter, seen in a photograph of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump shaking hands in Osaka, Japan two years ago, can be identified as Russian foreign ministry specialist linguist Daria Boyarskaya, 36, who is also an amateur salsa dancer.
According to a newspaper outlet, Stephanie Grisham told how Fiona Hill, the former administration’s Russia expert, had seen the inclusion of the interpreter as questionable, and as the meeting started, Fiona Hill leaned over and inquired if she’d seen Vladimir Putin’s translator, who was an extremely beautiful brunette woman with long hair, a comely face, and had a pleasing appearance.
She then continued to tell her that she speculated that the woman had been chosen by Vladimir Putin specifically to distract the then president.
Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov hit back at the report, rejecting any role for Putin in choosing Boyarskaya, a keen dancer, who he didn’t name, as a secret weapon.
Dmitry Peskov said that interpreters were provided by the foreign ministry at the behest of the presidential administration and that Vladimir Putin himself was not involved in the process of that.
However, it wasn’t the first time that Vladimir Putin had used Boyarskaya to translate in a session with an American president.
Before the Trump-Putin talks in Japan, the same interpreter had been deployed in 2016 at a meeting between Vladimir Putin and the then US president Barack Obama in Hangzhou, China.
This and the 2019 meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are openly recorded by the St Petersburg School of Conference Interpreting and Translation (SCIT), part of Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, from where she’d graduated in 2009.
Initially, she’d studied at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad.
According to the SCIT records, she additionally worked for Vladimir Putin at a session with US National Security Advisor John Bolton in Moscow on October 23, 2018, and she interpreted for the Russian president at a meeting he held with FIFA President Gianni Infantino in April 2016.
According to her social media, Boyarskaya works regularly at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
She wasn’t there to translate for Putin, but probably for other dignitaries because Vladimir Putin speaks excellent English, probably better than Donald Trump does. The story is yet no more than anti-Russian propaganda, and from the photos, Donald Trump didn’t even seem to notice she was in the room.
Although Vladimir Putin is an intelligent person, so why wouldn’t he do that for Donald Trump, knowing that he has a fondness for the ladies, which was a masterful move, I’d say. Although she didn’t turn up in exotic attire, she turned up professionally to do her job, but then being an attractive working woman frequently creates excitement in the loins of men.
This was pretty sexist from the Daily Mail. The lady was dressed professionally and looks like any average woman in the photos, and just because she does other things outside of her job doesn’t mean her only purpose was to be eye candy.
I doubt that she was sharing her social media pics in the meeting, and whoever was making this connection was really stretching to find a point.
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