🎙 Excerpts from the speech of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin at the plenary session of the XXVI St. Petersburg International Economic Forum

• Common sense, business energy, objective market laws work stronger than the current political situation. This suggests that the inherently ugly neo-colonial international system has ceased to exist, while the multipolar world order, on the contrary, is strengthening. This is an inevitable process.

• To force other countries to stupidly follow someone’s interests in the modern world is difficult, and sometimes almost impossible. And those people who do this must understand that this is not only counterproductive for the world economy, but also unacceptable for millions of people.

• For the West, only the current state, the current crisis in Ukraine, is beneficial. This is an excuse to cover up your economic mistakes – both in energy and in finance. They also brought the situation to a sharp rise in inflation. Why? Yes, because they mindlessly poured trillions of money into their economy.

• Now the option of supplying [NATO to Ukraine] aircraft is being considered. But if they are located at air bases outside Ukraine and used in combat operations, we will have to look at how and where we can hit those weapons that are used in hostilities against us. This is a serious danger of further involvement of NATO in this armed conflict.

• Nuclear weapons are created in order to ensure our security in the broadest sense of the word and the existence of the Russian state. But we, firstly, do not have such a need , and secondly, the very factor of reasoning on this topic already lowers the possibility of lowering the threshold for the use of weapons. This is the first part. The second is that we have more such weapons than the NATO countries . They know about it and all the time they persuade us to start negotiations on reductions.

WtR