A senior US official on Tuesday denounced the “absurdity” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s accusations that the Western threat against Russia justified the invasion of Ukraine.
“No one is attacking Russia. There is something absurd about Russia being under any sort of military threat from Ukraine or anyone else,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.
Ahead of Joe Biden’s speech, scheduled for 4:30 p.m. today, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Sullivan said that “[o Presidente] would not draw up any plan to end the war through diplomatic channels.”
Instead, he will focus on the broader lesson to be learned from the war in Ukraine in what he sees as a “tipping point” in a global struggle between democracies and autocratic regimes.
So his remarks will be specifically about the conflict in Ukraine, but of course he will also talk about the wider battle between (on the one hand) the aggressors who seek to destroy fundamental principles and (on the other) the democracies that are coming together to try to apply them,” he said.
In Warsaw and Moscow, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin delivered duel-style speeches on Tuesday, presenting two radically opposing positions on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a day after the US president’s surprise visit to Kiev.
Putin says West Russia wants to inflict strategic defeat
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday accused the West of wanting to impose a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Ukraine and end the country “once and for all.”
“Western elites make no secret of their goal: to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, that is, to finish us off once and for all,” he said in a State of the Nation address to both chambers of parliament three days before the first anniversary of the offensive against Ukraine.
“The responsibility for fueling the Ukrainian conflict and its victims (…) rests entirely with the Western elites,” the Russian president said, reiterating his statement that the West is supporting neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine to launch an anti consolidate war. struggle -Russian state.
The speech, the first on the state of the nation given by Putin in nearly two years, comes three days before marking the first anniversary of Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine, which began in the early hours of February 24, 2022.
Source: DN
