At a speech on Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin accused the West of intensifying the conflict in Ukraine and announced that Moscow will withdraw from a deal that would have reduced nuclear weapons between Moscow and the United States.
Putin also threatened to continue fighting in Ukraine before the first anniversary of the military war in his blistering state of the country speech to Russian MPs.
He claimed that although Russia was “forced” to postpone the New START deal, it would not completely withdraw from the agreement and accused Western countries of wanting “to be done with us once and for all.”
The 2010 treaty is the last significant arms control agreement between the US and Russia that is still in effect, but it has deteriorated recently due to charges from Washington that Moscow was not abiding by it.
A day after US President Joe Biden’s unexpected trip to Kyiv, where he pledged to provide Ukraine with more armaments, and before his speech in Warsaw, Putin was speaking.
Putin added, in reference to the situation in Ukraine, “we will deliberately and systematically solve the goals that face us.”
He said it was “impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield”.
“The responsibility for fuelling the Ukrainian conflict, for its escalation, for the number of victims… lies completely with Western elites,” Putin said.
A top US official described as an “absurdity” Putin’s accusations that Russia had been threatened by the West as justification for sending troops into Ukraine.
“Nobody is attacking Russia. There’s a kind of absurdity in the notion that Russia was under some form of military threat from Ukraine or anyone else,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters in Warsaw.
