Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday accused the West of using the conflict in Ukraine to “finish off” Russia, in an annual address to the nation, saying Westerners bear “responsibility” for the escalation.
“The elites of the West do not hide their objective: to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, that is to say to finish with us once and for all”, he hammered, in a speech intervening three days before the first anniversary of the Russian offensive.
“The responsibility for the fueling of the Ukrainian conflict and its victims (…) rests totally with the Western elites,” said the Russian president, repeating his thesis according to which the West supports neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine to consolidate an anti-Russian state.
Continue “carefully” its offensive in Ukraine
Before that, he had said that he remained determined, a year after the start of his offensive in Ukraine, to continue it, while his army has been struggling for months on the battlefield, despite the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists.
“To ensure the security of our country, to eliminate threats from a neo-Nazi regime that has existed in Ukraine since the 2014 coup, it was decided to carry out a special military operation. And we are going to settle step by step, carefully and methodically, the objectives which arise in front of us”, he hammered.
Facing the country’s political elite and the military who fought in Ukraine, he also thanked “all the Russian people for their courage and determination”.
Referring to the international sanctions affecting Russia, Mr. Putin considered that Westerners “have not achieved anything and will not achieve anything”while the Russian economy held up better than expected by experts.
“We have ensured the stability of the economic situation, protected the citizens”, he noted, believing that the West had failed to “destabilize our society”.