“What a coincidence”: US Senator Marco Rubio on the presence of Russian colonel in Colombia

Senator of Cuban descent Marco Rubio joined the controversy over the presence of Russian military man Dmitry Vladimirovich Tarantsov as attaché of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Colombia. He referred to the issue in connection with the accusations that have arisen against the colonel from the Colombian media for his alleged involvement in the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.

Congressman Rubio, who is a member of the Republican Party and is a member of the U.S. Senate Select Commission on Intelligence and is its oldest member, responded to a question posed to him on the issue during his visit to the Venezuelan community in Doral, Florida.

“What a coincidence that he is in Colombia!” , Rubio exclaimed in the round of questions, before saying that he has been warning for more than a year that “elements of the international left are seeking to interfere and create chaos in Colombia's elections.”

According to the senator, this bloc would be trying to interfere in Latin America through strategies such as chaos and misinformation, with the support of people from Cuba and Venezuela.

Faced with accusations that have spread around Dmitry Tarantsov, “who intend to present him [...] as a cyberspy allegedly linked to the actions of interfering in the US elections,” the Embassy of the Russian Federation issued a press release to defend its military attaché.

The Russian diplomatic office notes that Tarantsov is a career military man who has already been assigned other missions abroad. As Infobae had already said, he and his wife, Vitaliya Anatolyevna Tarantsova, are listed as military air attachés in the list of diplomats in United States of the summer of 2014. The colonel also appears in the diplomatic directory of the Government of Canada in 2007.

On the end of Colonel Tarantsov's mission to the United States, the Russian embassy assures that it happened under normal conditions “and returned to Russia in July 2015, that is, more than a year before the US presidential elections. U.U.”.

In addition, they note that the accusations against Tarantsov stem from a newspaper article by Foreign Policy, which also cites a report by the intelligence committee of the United States Senate on the aforementioned interference, a document in which Tarantsov's surname appears.

Among the thousands of pages of the five-volume report, there is hardly a brief mention of Tarantsov, who says “it is unknown whether Tarantsov attended the event”; specifically in the section “Russian efforts to investigate US voting systems and processes, as well as other elements of the voting infrastructure” . His first name or patronymic is not even stated in the rest of the documents.

The statement closes by stating that these reports around Tarantsov represent “another facet of spyaphobia on the verge of witch-hunting. Point. Nothing else.”

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