He attacks the Atlantic Alliance, which he accuses of “wanting to reaffirm its imperial ambitions”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin finally responded last night to the statements and measures announced by world leaders at the NATO conference in Madrid. If so far all his closest collaborators, such as Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov; the former Russian president, Dmitri Medvédev; whether the Russian Foreign Ministry, in the words of its chief, Sergei Lavrov, or the deputy minister, Sergei Riabkov, had criticized and threatened Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to the Alliance, Putin now sees no problem with that.
“We have no problems or territorial disputes with Sweden and Finland like we unfortunately have with Ukraine,” Putin said during a press appearance in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. “If Sweden and Finland want to, they can join, please. It’s their business. They can integrate into whatever they want,” he said. But he warned that the two Scandinavian countries must “clearly understand that before there were no threats to them and now, if they deploy military contingents and infrastructure, we will have to respond in the same way and create the same threats to them. These are obvious things.”
“The statement that we are fighting NATO expansion at the expense of Ukraine and that we will now have twice as much expansion with the accession of Sweden and Finland has no serious basis. That and a hypothetical Ukraine accession to the Alliance are completely different things,” Russia’s top leader said.
In his words, “the calls to Ukraine from the West and NATO to continue hostilities and reject negotiations confirm our assumption that Ukraine is not the target, nor is the well-being of the Ukrainian people the target.” they’re searching.” Putin said he was convinced that “this is the means to protect their own interests. That is, with the hand of Ukraine, of the Ukrainian people. NATO and the main countries that make up it just want to play their part in reaffirm the world, not their leadership, but their hegemonism in the strict sense of the word, their imperial ambitions.
He also insisted that the West “is preparing for a confrontation with Russia since 2014 and that this is not something new, therefore it explains our actions to defend our interests”, implying that the invasion of Ukraine is part of that measures, as Lavrov already assured. Putin denounced that “the United States needed an external enemy, around whose perceived threats it would be possible to unite the allies and Iran was not best suited for this role, Russia is. We gave them the opportunity to unite all the allies around us in a new historic turn.”
Putin also claimed that “the NATO bloc is a relic of a bygone era, the Cold War era. They constantly told us that NATO has changed, that it is now more of a political union, but everyone was looking for reasons and possibilities to give it a new impulse as a military organization. Well, here they are, they do it. This is nothing new to us (…) they started to make Ukraine an anti-Russia, a springboard, to try to hit Russia somehow, they started to fight against the Russian culture, the Russian language , they started persecuting people who feel they are part of the Russian world. They want to create an anti-Russian position near our borders and we will live under this threat constantly, under this sword of Damocles.”
Regarding statements by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that if the Russian president had been a woman he would not have started a war, the Russian president recalled that “it was Margaret Thatcher who made such a decision, hostilities launched against Argentina for the Falkland Islands. Here a woman decided and there was war. Where are these Falkland Islands and where is Britain? And that was nothing more than the fruit of imperial ambitions, a confirmation of his imperial status. So I think this wake-up call from the Prime Minister of Great Britain is in any case not very correct.”
Regarding the current Russian military intervention in Ukraine and its goals, Putin stated that “nothing has changed from what I publicly said to the whole country, to the world in the early hours of February 24. I have nothing to add. add.” He stressed that the aim remains “to liberate Donbass, to protect the people who live there and to create conditions that guarantee the security of Russia itself. That’s all”.
But he clarified that “only the tactics to be followed” will change: “where to move the troops, which targets to attack (…) and the work proceeds calmly, rhythmically. Well, as you can see, the troops are moving and reach the lines set as tasks at some stage of this combat action. Everything is going according to plan.”
Putin was against speaking about specific deadlines. According to his point of view, it is “not good to meet deadlines (…) it depends on the intensity of the fighting and the casualties it can cause. First of all, we need to think about how to protect the lives of our boys ”, although at no point did he refer to the high number of losses suffered by Russian troops, according to Kiev and international observers.
He also alluded to Monday’s rocket attack on a shopping center in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, described by Ukrainian President Volodímir Zelensky as a “terrorist act” that left 20 dead and more than 50 injured. “It was not a terrorist attack (…) we said it many times, we showed it, you can see it in the footage of the drones when they place weapons, anti-aircraft systems, artillery, heavy equipment in general in residential areas. ”
“Our military is not bombing civilian infrastructure. We have all the capacity to know what is in each place,” he assured.
Source: La Verdad
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