In a Showtime interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American film-maker Oliver Stone, which started airing on June 12th, Putin called «lies» many of the allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies, to the effect that he or his government attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He also accused the U.S. government of having actually done not only that (influencing other countries' democratic process), but far more actual meddling in Russian elections, and in the elections in other former Soviet-and-allied countries, and even done it in recent times, and even done it to countries that had never been friendly toward Russia. The way he asserted this accusation was veiled, however, so that he didn't identify the specific governments he was referring to, other than to say: «In 2000, and in 2012, this always happened. But especially aggressively in 2012. I will not go into details.» (This article will supply some of those «details», in what follows.) 

Putin described the current accusations against Russia, by the U.S. government, as a deceitful and fictitious tat, which ignores the very real and longstanding American tit, of CIA and other U.S., meddling in the electoral processes of foreign countries. 

The neoconservative American Jan Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine headlined on June 16th about these Showtime interviews, «10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone's Putin Interviews», and sub-headlined: «From denying any involvement with U.S. election hacking to Putin's love of Judo and Stalin, our takeaways from these truly baffling conversations». Wenner's reporter opened:

What's the Russian equivalent of Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, it's definitely red – and Oliver Stone has eagerly drunk it down.

The trailers for The Putin Interviews, Showtime's four-part series documenting a series of conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stone, would have you believe that you're going to hear some pretty hard-hitting stuff as the autocrat and the filmmaker face off, Frost-Nixon style. What we got instead was a series of softballs lobbed lovingly in the direction of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world.

Except for a few moments, Stone seems serenely unconcerned with anything beyond flattering his subject – and engaging in some supremely one-sided exchanges about history and policy along the way.