Trump Is ‘Not My Bride,’ Putin Says MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin seemed to be in top form during a news conference in China on Tuesday, answering a question about President Trump by saying the American leader is “not my bride, and I am not his groom.” While the comment could be interpreted as a subtle jab by a macho Mr. Putin against an equally macho counterpart, the Russian president offered it as an explanation of why he could not comment on domestic American politics. At the news conference, he called the shuttering of some Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States “an obvious violation of property rights” and said that, “for starters,” he would instruct the Foreign Ministry to challenge the decision in court Mr. Putin is in Xiamen, China, for a meeting of leaders from the so-called BRICS group, a quintet of nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — once hailed as dynamic and fast-growing, but that have fallen, to varying degrees, on hard times.
