Is the bromance kaput? The Kremlin says Trump ad 'demonizes' Putin
Is the bromance over?
Vladimir Putin's spokesman says he isn't happy about Donald Trump's new ad which he says "demonizes" the president and Russia.
"I saw this clip. I do not know for sure if Vladimir Putin saw it. [But] our attitude is negative," the president's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow, according to Russia's TASS news agency.
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Until now, the two has exchanged mostly compliments.
Trump has said he'd get on "very well" with Putin. And Putin has called Trump "a really brilliant and talented person."
The video ad in question was posted to Trump's Instagram account Wednesday. It questions Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton's ability to deal with the United States' adversaries -- especially Putin's Russia.
The ad starts with a white-robed Putin effortlessly throwing a judo opponent to the mat, before cutting to footage of a masked ISIS militant — thought to be a bouncy castle salesman from Britain named Siddhartha Dhar— brandishing a hand gun.
The ad then moves to a clip of Clinton imitating a barking dog during a recent campaign stop, before cutting back to footage of Putin chuckling.
"We don't need to be a punchline," reads the ad's closing message.
But the Kremlin isn't laughing.
"It's an open secret for us that demonizing Russia and whatever is linked to Russia is unfortunately a mandatory hallmark of America's election campaign," Peskov said. "We always sincerely regret this and wish the electoral process was conducted without such references to our country."
Putin himself has not commented on the ad.
Trump's campaign did not respond to Mashable's questions about the Kremlin's reaction to it.
If this is the end of the bromance and we never get that shot of Trump and Putin together, at least we'll have this.
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Topics Donald Trump Elections
Christopher is Mashable's Senior Correspondent covering world news, particularly the post-Soviet space and especially Ukraine, where he lived and worked for more than five years. As an editor at Ukraine's Kyiv Post newspaper, Christopher was part of the team that won the 2014 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism for coverage of the Euromaidan Revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. Besides Mashable, he has published with The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and GlobalPost from such countries as Greece, Italy, Israel, Russia and Turkey, among others, as well as from aboard a search and rescue ship off the Libyan coast. Originally from rainy Portland, Oregon, he is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine) currently based in New York.
