President Vladimir Putin asserted Russia’s strength and resilience on Friday against a Western world that he accused of colonial arrogance and trying to crush his country with an economic “blitzkrieg” of sanctions, Reuters has reported.
Addressing the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a showcase event being held this year with almost no Western participation, he returned time and again to the theme of Russia’s sovereignty in a new global order:
“We are strong people and can cope with any challenge. Like our ancestors, we will solve any problem, the entire thousand-year history of our country speaks of this.”
Putin drew applause when he reaffirmed his determination to continue the “special military operation” in Ukraine that has unleashed a barrage of Western economic sanctions.
He said the main aim was to defend “our” people in the largely Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine — a justification that Kyiv and the West dismiss as a baseless pretext for a campaign that has already cost
thousands of lives and led to the occupation of parts of Ukraine far beyond the Donbas.
In his 73-minute speech, Putin said Russian soldiers were also fighting to defend Russia’s own “rights to secure development.”
“Against a backdrop of increasing risks for us and threats, Russia’s decision to conduct a special military operation was forced — difficult, of course, but forced and necessary.”
’New World Order’
A recorded video address by Chinese President Xi Jinping praising Chinese-Russian cooperation underlined Putin’s contention that an era of American domination is at an end.
Putin said the UnS considered itself “God’s emissary on Earth,” and that Russia was taking its place in a new world order whose rules would be set by “strong and sovereign states.”
He called the campaign in Ukraine the action of a “sovereign country that has the right to defend its security,” and accused the West of “active military appropriation of Ukrainian territory.”
But he appeared to acknowledge the scale of destruction being wrought, while absolving Russian forces.
In a two-hour question-and-answer session after his speech, he evoked Stalingrad, the Soviet city razed by attritional urban warfare in World War Two, now renamed Volgograd.
“We must not turn those cities and towns that we liberate into a semblance of Stalingrad,” he said. “This is a natural thing that our military thinks about when organizing hostilities.”
Putin also said strikes against residential areas were crimes against humanity.
Ukraine says Russian forces are responsible for thousands of civilian deaths, the obliteration of towns such as Mariupol, and the displacement of a third of its peacetime population.
Russia denies attacking civilian targets, and says allegations that it has perpetrated war crimes are based on Ukrainian and Western fabrications.
Cyber Attack
Shortly before Putin was …….
Source: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2106001/business-economy