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“The West wants to destroy Russia,” the Russian president also said in an interview. For his part, the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky, once again promised that his country will recover Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
The Russian president accused NATO members of participating in the conflict in Ukraine by delivering weapons to kyiv. “They are sending Ukraine tens of billions of dollars. This really is participation,” Putin said in an interview with the Rossiya-1 channel broadcast on Sunday.
“This means that they are taking part, albeit indirectly, in the crimes of the kyiv regime,” said the Russian president.
Putin considered that Western countries have “a single goal: to dissolve the former Soviet Union and its main part, the Russian Federation.”
“Only then may we be accepted into the so-called family of civilized peoples, but only separately, each part separately,” he said.
Putin was speaking on the sidelines of a patriotic concert held in Moscow on Thursday on the eve of the first anniversary of the start of the Russian military offensive in kyiv.
In the interview, the president reiterated his call for a multipolar world, saying he had “no doubt” that it would eventually happen.
“Now that (the United States’) attempts to reconfigure the world after the fall of the Soviet Union have led to this situation, we are compelled to react,” he said.
In return, the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, once again promised that his country will recover Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
“Nine years ago, the Russian aggression began in Crimea. By taking back Crimea we will restore peace. It is our land and our people, our history,” Zelensky said on Telegram.
The US State Department thanked in a statement “Ukraine’s efforts (…) to draw world attention to the continuing Russian occupation.”
“The United States does not and will never recognize the alleged Russian annexation of the peninsula,” he added.
In an interview published on Sunday in the newspapers of the German regional press group Funke, the number two in Ukrainian military intelligence Vadym Skibitsky said that Kiev was preparing a new counteroffensive for the spring.
“One of our strategic military objectives is to try to open a gap in the Russian front in the south”, towards Crimea, he detailed.
“We will only stop until we get our country back to its 1991 borders. This is our message to Russia and the international community,” he added.
Skibitsky also said that Ukraine could bomb military bases in Russia, such as in the Belgorod border region, which has already been targeted.