Putin accuses 'dirty, bloody' West of fuelling war in Ukraine & imposing 'hegemonic' rule

Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused the Western nations of escalating the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and accused them of eroding the principles of collective security, with the substitution of international law for the so-called rules-based order. Speaking at the 19th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in a forum themed The World After Hegemony: Justice and Security for All, Putin launched a scathing attack on the “so-called West” for attempting to instate one "hegemonic" rule. 

'They’re fuelling the war in Ukraine..': Putin

The Russian President slammed the western nations for trying to escalate the war in Ukraine. "They’re fuelling the war in Ukraine," said the head of the Russian Federation, adding that they have been fuelling tensions around Taiwan, destabilizing the world food and roiling the energy markets. "As far as the last one is concerned, it is not deliberate, [I] don’t doubt that," Putin said at the meeting. Russia's leader noted that energy and food security was impacted globally due to a number of systematic errors committed by the Western authorities, referring to crippling sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation in response to its invasion. 

Putin accused the West of playing a “dangerous” game as he asserted that the dominion of the world "is precisely what the West has decided to stake in this game. But this game is a dangerous, dirty, and bloody one." He further iterated that such acts contest the "sovereignty of peoples and nations, their identity and uniqueness and have no regard whatsoever for the interests of other countries." He furthermore stated that humanity, which stands at a crossroads, has two options – "either continue to 'accumulate all of the problems that are certain to crush all of us' or nations can work together 'to find solutions.'"

Russia earlier accused the "nuclear US-UK-France troika" - the nuclear alliance of NATO, of waging a proxy-war strategy against Moscow by bringing weapons into Kyiv, and expanding the alliance to its eastern flank, posing a grave threat to Russia's national security.  In a statement made at the Military Security and Arms Control summit in Vienna, Moscow lambasted US' Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer for "openly declaring that the US is in a state of war with Russia". Hoyer (D-Md.) was arguing on the House floor about the ongoing inflation of energy costs due to Russia's war. The Kremlin also previously refuted the United States' narrative of it waging a "nuclear war'' saying that such a conflict "must never be fought'' and that any military conflict between nuclear powers "must be avoided as declared by P5 countries". Moscow accused the West of flaring the Ukraine conflict by supplying weapons to Ukraine to kill Russian commanders and its military forces.