RussiaFeed — Vladimir Putin SLAMS the US for its past, present and likely future

Previously, Putin has generally sounded conciliatory. Now the gloves are coming off?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered one of his most wide reaching criticisms of the United States to-date, during his Q and A session at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi.

Putin described a worsening Moscow-Washington relationship that dates back to the 1990s when an ‘untrustworthy’ west took advantage of Russia’s weak leadership in the age of Yeltsin, Gaidar and Chubais....

“Our biggest mistake was that we trusted you too much. You interpreted our trust as weakness and you exploited that… 

What we got in return is well-known: a complete disregard for our national interests, support for separatism in the Caucasus, a circumvention of the United Nations Security Council, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Iraq, and so on. The US must have seen the state of our nuclear weapons and economy and decided to do away with international law”. 

He continued,

“They started to openly interfere in the sovereign affairs of countries and to export democracy in the same way as in their time the Soviet leadership tried to export the Socialist revolution to the whole world”....

The Russian President then turned to the subject of weapons reductions, stating that because the US refuses to engage in proper treaties on the matter, Russia has had to act unilaterally to disarm. Russia recently destroyed its last chemical weapons stocks while the US refused to do the same. President Putin described the phenomenon in the following way,

“We destroyed everything, and then our American partners said – ‘Not yet, we don’t have money.’ So, they have a dollar printing press, yet they don’t have money. But we, on the other hand, do?”...

RussiaFeed
Vladimir Putin SLAMS the US for its past, present and likely future