(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) In a televised address Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned oligarchs who have adopted the West’s extravagant lifestyle and woke ideology, while warning that West’s foreign policy aims at “the destruction of Russia,” the Daily Mail reported.
“I do not judge those with villas in Miami or the French Riviera. Or who can’t get by without oysters or foie gras or so-called ‘gender freedoms,'” Putin said about Russian oligarchs who sympathize with the West.
“The problem is they mentally exist there, and not here, with our people, with Russia,” he said.
Putin said that he will not tolerate American sympathizers in Russia who try to undermine the nation’s existence or allow the West to retain its global hegemony.
“The West will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on traitors … to divide our society … to provoke civil confrontation…to strive to achieve its aim,” he said. “And there is one aim – the destruction of Russia.”
Putin portrayed the war in Ukraine as a struggle for Russia’s existence.
Since coming to power in 1999, he has consistently told the West that he considers NATO’s eastward expansion into Ukraine an existential threat to the Russian Federation’s survival.
He called for Ukraine’s “neutrality, demilitarisation, and denazification,” adding that it is a fight “for the future of our country and our children.”
Most nations, Putin noted, oppose the West’s sanctions on Russia, as well as America’s “global dominance…in politics and economics.”
Putin promised that the war in Ukraine will make Russia stronger because it will weed out Western sympathizers, the Houston Chronicle reported.
“Any people, and particularly the Russian people, will always be able to tell the patriots from the scum and traitors and spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths,” he said.
“I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to meet any challenge,” he said.
As Putin appealed Russia’s cause to the world, US President Joe Biden answered back with some inflammatory rhetoric of his own, referring to Putin as a “war criminal.”
Biden says he believes Putin is a “war criminal” pic.twitter.com/wUxm0lOuEu
— Kevin Liptak (@Kevinliptakcnn) March 16, 2022
