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Vladimir Putin answered sharp and borderline provocative questions by Western reporters at his big presser in Kazan on Thursday, providing journalists from unfriendly countries a crash course on the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis after they accused Russia of plans for a "massive escalation."
“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it's not Russia's actions that have led to an escalation in Ukraine. Rather, it is the coup d’état in 2014, which was supported first and foremost by the US. The US has even publicly announced how much money it spent back then to organize and orchestrate this coup d’état…A number of European leaders have said publicly that they had been duping us because they had been using that time to rearm the Ukrainian troops,” Putin told an NBC reporter who brought up Ukraine, North Korea and the oft-touted but never proven claims of Russian plans to interfere in US elections.
“You spoke about drone attacks and so on. Yes, indeed, we didn't have that [before the start of the Special Military Operation]. But there was a much worse situation. It was that we received as a response to our [security] proposals...we were always being told where is our place is. And in the end, where we were ‘supposed to be’ would lead us to falling back of sliding to the second-tier countries which are only serving the purpose of commodity markets, appendages with a loss to a great extent of our national sovereignty,” Putin separately told the BBC's veteran Russia correspondent.
“This is a clear double standard that Western journalists are allowed to pose questions to President Putin while Russian journalists cannot directly question Joe Biden,” Jeremy Kuzmarov, managing editor of CovertAction Magazine, told Sputnik, commenting on the irony of the fact that the Russian president fielded so many questions from Western journalists in Kazan while Russian media have been essentially shut out, sanctioned and banned in Washington.
Even when it comes to questions from the US's own media, the Biden presidency has been a standout when it comes to evading the press, with commander-in-chief holding the fewest press conference and interviews of any president since the 1980s, including just 15 solo news conferences over his nearly four years in office.
“The NBC news correspondent asked about North Korean troops and whether Putin had been talking to Donald Trump. He suggested that Russia was escalating the war in Ukraine by inviting North Korean troops, but Putin responded that it was the US who had started the war when it initiated the 2014 Maidan coup - something the NBC correspondent seemed oblivious about. The Trump question showed the Western media's obsession with an alleged Trump-Putin connection that has never proven to have existed,” Kuzmarov said.
The BRICS Summit in Kazan that Putin’s press conference was dedicated to highlighted the reality of a “growing alliance of countries that want to establish a multipolar world order,” the observer added.
“From Washington’s point of view this trend is disturbing, since it reflects the end of the dream of US unipolar power…The growth of BRICS is a reality that Washington policymakers will ultimately have to come to terms with and adapt to,” Kuzmarov summed up.
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