According to the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin has thanked US President Donald Trump during a phone conversation for the intelligence data provided by the CIA that helped detain terrorists who had been plotting a terrorist attack in Saint Petersburg.
While expressing the Kremlin's gratitude to the CIA director and the agency's employees, Putin has ensured his counterpart that Russian special services would "certainly and immediately" share intelligence information with their US colleagues on the terrorist threat in the country "as it had always been done before."
The information shared by the CIA helped "track, find and detain a group of terrorists planning explosions in the Kazan Cathedral of Saint Petersburg, as well as other public places" in the home city of Putin.
On Friday, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had detained a cell of Daesh supporters in a special operation on December 13-14 that had been planning to commit "high-profile attacks" in St. Petersburg aiming to kill people by detonating explosive devices in crowded places, adding that "a significant amount of explosives, components of improvised explosive devices, automatic weapons, ammunition, extremist literature were seized from them. A laboratory manufacturing explosive devices was destroyed." According to a video posted by the FSB, one of detained Daesh supporters has admitted his involvement in the preparation of terrorist acts in the city.
The Kremlin has repeatedly emphasized that Russia is willing to develop ties with the US on an equal basis and with mutual respect, with President Putin saying during his large-scale end-of-year press conference earlier this week that he hopes that Trump "will have opportunities to improve contacts" with Moscow in line with the US president's campaign pledges to "get along" with Russia.
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Despite his statements during the presidential campaign, since Trump had assumed office, Washington has imposed new sanctions on Moscow, targeting Russia's energy projects among other things, and also has been involved in a dispute over the seizure of Russian diplomatic property in the US.
