MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin defended his country’s war against Ukraine and lashed out at the West for international sanctions adopted in its wake while speaking at an economic forum in Russia’s Far East on Wednesday.
Putin called the sanctions Western countries imposed on Russia for its belligerence towards Ukraine a “threat to the entire world.” This Western zeal for sanctions was the main threat to world peace, he added.
The Russian president also claimed that his country is weathering what he termed “the economic, financial and technological aggressions” of the West well, and insisted that Western countries are suffering more due to the sanctions than Russia has.
Putin slammed the West for what he called “its aggressive attempts to force other countries towards its model of behaviour, to rob them of their sovereignty and to impose their own will on them.”
In his remarks on Wednesday, Putin claimed that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was necessary.
“I can say that the main benefit has been the strengthening of our sovereignty, and that is an unmistakable result of what is happening right now,” he said, arguing that the assault on Ukraine had been needed to defend Russia.
“We have lost nothing and we will lose nothing,” Putin asserted.
It’s possible his statements found some listeners among Western allies. Later in the day, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a sometime Putin ally, charged that Western countries are “provoking” the Russia-Ukraine war with weapons deliveries, among others.
“The West is pursuing a policy based on provocation ... It is said that weapons are being sent; they are sending all the scrap they have to Ukraine,” Erdogan told reporters in Belgrade, without naming any country.
Since the attack started at the end of February, Russia has dug in forces in the Ukraine’s east and south, though Ukraine says it is beginning to launch counteroffensives.
One hotly contested region is the area around the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant. The fighting around an active nuclear plant has sparked serious fears about a potential nuclear disaster.
Putin insisted that there are no weapons at the Zaporizhzhya plant in Ukraine, disputing one of the charges laid out in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week.
“In the reports it speaks about the necessity of getting military technology off of the plant’s territory,” Putin told reporters. “But there is no military technology on the grounds.” He invited Western journalists to come to the site themselves to make their own impressions.
The IAEA has called the situation there untenable, sparking the United Nations to call for an end to fighting around the power plant.
However, according to the Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has requested more information about the opinion of a team of international nuclear experts there. Russia and Ukraine have traded accusations about who has fired shots at the site for weeks now. Independent confirmation of these accounts is impossible. Russia has occupied the site since early in its attack on Ukraine.
Ukraine on Wednesday reiterated its call for Russian troops to withdraw from the Zaporizhzhya plant. Otherwise, security proposals made by IAEA cannot be implemented, Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on Facebook.
“Because only we, unlike the Russians, are able to guarantee the implementation of all the components of operational safety,”Galushchenko asserted.
In another rebuke of Western views, the Russian president described the Western accusation that Russia was using gas as a weapon as”nonsense and madness.” — dpa
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