Vladimir Putin has laid out his vision of Russia’s role in a multipolar world in a defiant speech he delivered in the Russian city of Sochi on Thursday.
Speaking at the 22nd meeting of the annual Valdai Discussion Club, Putin was bullish both on Russian military progress in Ukraine and in terms of Russia’s resistance to NATO, nearly all members of which, he said, were now fighting against his country.
Putin denied that Russia had any intention of attacking Europe or that Russia had invaded NATO airspace, despite the authorities in multiple European countries accusing Russia of violating their territory with drones or fighter jets in recent weeks.
Putin described the impounding of an oil tanker thought to be part of Russia’s shadow fleet by the French authorities last week as “piracy” and said that the incident was merely being used to distract the French from their own domestic problems.
When addressing the prospect of Ukraine’s Western allies providing Kyiv with longer-range weapons such as US Tomahawk missiles, Putin’s language became far less ambiguous, however, and included a warning that any such transfer would constitute a dangerous new escalation.
Though US President Donald Trump recently appeared to have changed tack on his support for Ukraine in recent weeks, Putin nevertheless continued his flattery of the American leader, repeating Trump’s regular assertion that the war in Ukraine would not have happened had Trump been in office in 2022.
“I return to what President Trump once said. He said that if he had been in office back then, this could have been avoided. I agree with that.”
Putin said that it was time for Kyiv to negotiate an end to the war, pointing to Ukraine’s severe lack of manpower, while noting that Russian forces now controlled almost all of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, as well as large parts of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.