From the Guardian’s Ukraine liveblog:
Putin claims Ukraine war shows West has “lost touch with reality”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the United States was seeking to impose its crumbling hegemony across the world and that the war in Ukraine showed how far the West had lost touch with reality.
“We did not start the so-called war in Ukraine. On the contrary - we are trying to finish it,” Putin told a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
The West had caused the war because the United States was a “hegemon” which considered itself the only arbiter of truth on the planet, said the Kremlin chief.
Putin said the leaders of the West had lost “a sense of reality” because of what he cast as Washington’s “colonial thinking”. He questioned what right the United States had to lecture any other country.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 unleashed a war that has devastated swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine, killed or injured hundreds of thousands of men and triggered the biggest rupture in Russia’s ties with the West for six decades.
