Russian President Vladimir Putin has charged against Western countries in his speech on Wednesday at the Eastern Economic Forum, which is being held this week in Vladivostok. In addition to ensuring that "it is impossible to isolate Russia", the head of the Kremlin accused the West of causing "a global cold" with its sanctions and of committing "aggression against Russia".
The Kremlin chief began by noting that, after the coronavirus epidemic, other challenges have come to replace it. "This is a sanction fever" that threatens the whole world, he said, referring to the packages of punishments that Western countries have imposed against the Russian economy after Putin himself decided in February to put his tanks in Ukraine. "There is nothing extraordinary about this. It is a policy that the Western community has been practicing for decades," he said.
Putin maintains that these sanctions will not work and that they will not achieve the objective of breaking the eleventh largest economy in the world. "It doesn't matter how much some want to isolate Russia. It's impossible," he said in a setting conducive to it, a forum in which Russia seeks interaction with Asian countries.
The Eastern Economic Forum, which is celebrating its seventh edition, was attended by, among other representatives of Asian countries, the president of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China, Li Zhanshu, who is the third most important man in Beijing; and the head of the Burma Military Junta, Min Aung Hlaing.
In these months of sanctions and cuts in purchases of Russian hydrocarbons by Western countries, Moscow has sought alternatives. In Asia, China and India have offset the loss of shipments to European countries with the purchase of oil. The rise in the price of black gold has also helped the Russian economy.
On the contrary, according to Putin, it is the European countries that are going to suffer the "cold" the most. Its citizens, according to him, are being sacrificed to "preserve the dictatorship of the United States."
In his opinion, the catalyst for this way of acting is that the US is losing hegemony in the world, but Western leaders refuse to accept it.
"The level of industrial development achieved in Europe, people's quality of life, socio-economic stability - all of this is thrown into the furnace of sanctions," Putin continued. That development "is consumed at the behest of Washington in the name of notorious Euro-Atlantic unity, and is in fact sacrificed to preserve the dictatorship of the United States in world affairs," Putin said in Vladivostok, the capital of Russia's Far Eastern Federal District.
The president also accused the West of exercising aggression against his country with these sanctions. "Russia will resist the economic, financial and technological aggression of the West. And I rightly call it aggression. You can't call it anything else," he said.
He also accused Western countries of trying to impose "their models" on the whole world and deprive other countries of sovereignty. This is "a threat to the world," she concluded.
