SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin condemned the United States on Thursday for seeking to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine and said a struggle was underway to shape a new world order as the Western-dominated post-Cold War era crumbled.
“We have come to a dangerous line,” Putin told the Valdai discussion club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, a day after learning that Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidential election.
“The calls of the West to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, a country with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, demonstrates the exorbitant adventurism of Western politicians,” said Putin.
The West had arrogantly sought to cast Russia as a defeated power after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, he said, describing the U.S.-led NATO military alliance as an anachronism.
Russia, he said, did not consider Western civilisation to be the enemy despite attempts by the United States and its allies to isolate Moscow.
The world was changing in any case, he said, and many powerful countries did not want to isolate Russia.
“The former structure of the world is irrevocably disappearing, we can say it has already gone, and a serious, irreconcilable struggle is unfolding for the formation of a new one,” Putin said.
“The world needs Russia, and no decisions by supposed superiors in Washington or Brussels can change that.”
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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