How did they justify this statement? A press release from Putin.

Effectively, yes.

The consortium just linked to the original story from Indian Punchline (the author's personal blog) where the author quoted the statement from a TASS article.

It's not hard hitting, factual news. It's an OpEd piece from a blogger.

If we wrapped Robert Parry's corpse with copper wire and surrounded his casket with magnets, we could probably power a small city with the electricity from him turning over in his grave at how far Consortium News has fallen in publishing articles like this.