A defiant Vladimir Putin declared on Friday that the Western order was collapsing, brushing aside the economic and diplomatic consequences of his invasion of Ukraine in a speech the Kremlin called “extremely important.”
The Russian president offered a sweeping denunciation of the United States and defense of its financial policies, but largely avoided talking about the war in his speech to Russia’s main economic forum, which was delayed by an apparent cyberattack.
Putin argued that the era of US global dominance had come to an end and claimed that “blitzkrieg” sanctions imposed on Moscow’s economy by Washington and its allies had failed.
“The old world order is finished, regardless of all efforts to preserve it, it’s a natural form of history,” he told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual business meeting launched in 1997 as a Russian alternative to the World Economic Forum. . meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
A situation with “A strong power with a limited circle of countries [in support]”It was not stable,” he said, adding that it was a mistake for the United States to claim victory in the Cold War and treat other countries “like colonies.”
Putin said the war in Ukraine, which he said was started to protect the Russian-speaking population in the country’s east, was “the decision of a sovereign country based on the right to defend its security.”
“All the objectives of the special military operation will be implemented, there is no doubt about it,” he added.
The United States has helped build an alliance to aid Ukraine’s defensive war with military supplies while hitting Russia’s economy with harsh sanctions. Putin said his country was resisting those efforts, pointing to rising price inflation and energy costs in the West as evidence that those sanctions had failed.
Costs were rising in the West “long before we launched the special military operation in the Donbas,” he added, mocking the idea of a “Putin price hike” and clinging to his own narrow definition of war that he has now caused nearly four months of death and destruction for Russia’s democratic neighbor.
As he spoke, Russian forces were pressing their attacks on towns in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, an offensive that has seen Moscow troops make painstaking gains behind a heavy artillery assault. But even with the gains on the battlefield, the Kremlin suffered another diplomatic setback on Friday when the European Union executive recommended putting Kyiv on the path to bloc membership.
Before the speech, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin’s speech would be “extremely important,” according to the Russian state news agency Tass.
But the speech was delayed more than 90 minutes due to a DDoS attack at the conference, whereby hackers flood websites with traffic in an effort to disrupt their operations or take them offline, according to Peskov.
Because major DDoS attacks are usually carried out with a large number of hacked devices visiting the same site in unison, it is usually impossible to definitively say who is responsible for them.
But Ukraine’s IT Army, an international group of volunteer hackers backed by the country’s digital transformation minister Mykhailo Fedorov, had encouraged its members to attack the event in a post on its Telegram channel.
The forum organizers said that 13,500 people from 141 countries attended last year’s forum, which was held online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many nations have shunned Russia since it launched a brutal invasion of Ukraine in February, but Egypt is participating in the forum this year as a “guest country.”
St. Petersburg has added meaning for Putin. As well as being his hometown, it is named after Peter the Great, the modernizing but militant 18th-century czar to whom Putin compared himself favorably earlier this month.
Reuters, Kevin Collier Y Associated Press contributed.
Reference-www.nbcnews.com