Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he speaks at the plenary session of the 19th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club outside Moscow. Photo / Sergei Karpukhin, Sputnik, via AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday sought to cast the conflict in Ukraine as part of what he described as efforts by the West to secure its global domination that are doomed to fail.
In a long speech at a conference of international policy experts, Putin accused the U.S. and its allies of trying to dictate their terms to other nations in a “dangerous, bloody and dirty” domination game.
Putin, who sent his troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, has cast Western support for Ukraine as part of broad efforts by Washington and its allies to enforce its will upon others through what they call a rules-based world order. The Russian leader claimed that the Western policies will foment more chaos, adding that “he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind”.
Putin claimed that “humankind now faces a choice: accumulate a load of problems that will inevitably crush us all or try to find solutions that may not be ideal but working and could make the world more stable and secure”.
He argued that the world has reached a turning point when “the West is no longer able to dictate its will to humankind but still tries to do it, and the majority of nations no longer want to tolerate it”.
The Russian leader said Russia isn’t the enemy of the West but will continue to oppose the purported diktat of Western neo-liberal elites, accusing them of trying to subdue Russia.
“Their goal is to make Russia more vulnerable and turn it into an instrument for fulfilling their geopolitical tasks, they have failed to achieve it and they will never succeed,” Putin said.
The Russian president reaffirmed his long-held claim that Russians and Ukrainians are part of a single people and again denigrated Ukraine as an “artificial state,” which received historic Russian lands from Communist rulers during the Soviet times.
Speaking about the Ukrainian conflict, Putin said he thinks “all the time” about the casualties Russia has suffered in the conflict, but insisted that Nato’s refusal to rule out prospective Ukraine’s membership and Kyiv’s refusal to adhere to a peace deal for its separatist conflict in the country’s east has left Moscow no other choice.
He denied underestimating Ukraine’s ability to fight back and insisted that his “special military operation” has proceeded as planned.
Putin also acknowledged the challenges posed by Western sanctions, but argued that Russia has proven resilient to foreign pressure and become more united.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces attacked Russia’s hold on the southern city of Kherson while fighting intensified in the country’s east. The battles came amid reports that Moscow-appointed authorities in the city have abandoned it, joining tens of thousands of residents who fled to other Russia-held areas.
Ukrainian forces were surrounding Kherson from the west and attacking Russia’s foothold on the west bank of the Dnieper River, which divides the region and the country.
More than 70,000 residents from the Kherson city area have evacuated in recent days, the region’s Kremlin-installed governor, Vladimir Saldo, said.
Members of the Russia-backed regional administration also fled, the deputy governor, Kirill Stremousov said. Monuments to Russian heroes were moved, along with the remains of Grigory Potemkin, the Russian general who founded Kherson in the 18th century. His remains were kept at the city’s St. Catherine’s Church.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described reports of Russian troops’ possible withdrawal from the city as disinformation.
“I don’t see them fleeing from Kherson,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. “This is an information attack, so that we go there, transfer troops from other dangerous directions there.”
A privilege to speak to the President of Ukraine @ZelenskyyUa this evening.
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) October 25, 2022
Both he and the Ukrainian people can count on the UK's continued solidarity and support.
We will always stand with Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/ycVr3K0DVS
Zelenskyy also dismissed as “theatre” recent attempts by local Kremlin-backed officials to persuade the city’s civilian residents to relocate deeper into Russian-held territory ahead of the Ukrainian advance.
“Their most trained soldiers are in position. We see this and do not believe them,” Zelenskyy said.
In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces continued to bombard the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, making slow gains toward the center.
The deputy head of Russia’s delegation at a UN arms control panel, Konstantin Vorontsov, described the use of US and other Western commercial satellites for military purposes during the fighting as “extremely dangerous.”
“The quasi-civilian infrastructure could be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike,” Vorontsov warned.
As they have all month, Russian forces carried out attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which have caused increasing worry ahead of winter.
A Russian drone attack early Thursday hit an energy facility near the capital of Kyiv, causing a fire, said Kyiv regional Gov. Oleksiy Kuleba. He said the latest attacks inflicted “very serious damage”.
“The Russians are using drones and missiles to destroy Ukraine’s energy system ahead of the winter and terrorise civilians,” Kuleba said in televised remarks.
Kuleba announced new rolling blackouts and urged consumers to save power. He said authorities were still pondering how to restore power.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said rolling blackouts would also be introduced in the neighboring Chernihiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions.
Zelenskyy has said that Russian attacks have already destroyed 30 per cent of the country’s energy infrastructure.
In a likely response to Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, a power plant was attacked just outside Sevastopol, a port in the Russian-annexed region of Crimea. The plant suffered minor damage in a drone attack, according to city leader Mikhail Razvozhayev. He said electricity supplies were uninterrupted.
Crimea, a region slightly larger than Sicily, was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014. It has faced drone attacks and explosions amid the fighting in Ukraine. In a major setback for Russia, a powerful truck bomb blew up a section of a strategic bridge linking Crimea to Russia’s mainland on October 8.
A senior Ukrainian military officer accused Russia of planning to stage explosions at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and blame them on Ukraine in a false-flag attack.
General Oleksii Gromov, the chief of the main operational department of the Ukrainian military’s general staff, pointed to Moscow’s repeated unfounded allegations that Ukraine was plotting to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb as a possible signal that Moscow was planning explosions at the plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station.
Russia took control of the Zaporizhzhia plant in the opening days of the invasion. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of attacking the plant, which had its reactors shut down following continuous shelling.
Gromov also charged Thursday that Russian forces may have set off explosions at residential buildings in the city of Kherson before retreating from the city.
The war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis is likely to cause global demand for fossil fuels to peak or flatten out, according to a report released Thursday by the Paris-based International Energy Agency, largely due to the decline in Russian exports.
“Today’s energy crisis is delivering a shock of unprecedented breadth and complexity,” the IEA said in its annual report, the World Energy Outlook.
The report said the crisis was forcing the world’s more advanced economies to accelerate structural changes toward renewable energy sources.
In an excellent conversation with @RishiSunak we agreed to write a new chapter in 🇺🇦-🇬🇧 relations but the story is the same - full support in the face of Russian aggression. I appreciate PM’s first call to Ukraine. And always grateful for the support of the 🇬🇧 people.
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 25, 2022
In other developments, Ukrainian authorities said they were launching a criminal case against Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, accusing her of enabling the abduction and forced adoption of thousands of vulnerable Ukrainian children.
Maria Lvova-Belova said this week that she herself has adopted a boy seized by the Russian army in the bombed-out city of Mariupol.
Last month, she was sanctioned by the US, UK and other Western nations over allegations that she masterminded the removal of over 2000 vulnerable children from the embattled Donetsk and Luhansk region in Ukraine’s east. According to Ukraine, she also orchestrated a new policy to facilitate their forced placement with “foster families” in Russia.
The site was used by Hezbollah to plan attacks on Israeli civilians.