Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the US presidential election on Thursday from the plenary meeting of the Valdai International Debate Club.
In response to a question, Putin stated that he is ready for dialogue with Trump.
“For my part
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to call you,
I just don’t, because the leaders of the western states used to call me almost every week for a while, and then suddenly they stopped. Well, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to. As you can see, we are alive and well, developing and moving forward. If any of them wants to get in touch again, I have always said and I want to say it now – we have no objection to it,” the Russian president said at the forum held in Sochi.
“What (Trump) said about wanting to restore relations with Russia and contribute to the resolution of the crisis in Ukraine seems to me to be at least worthy of attention,” he said.
He said he was affected by Trump’s behavior during the assassination attempt and called Donald Trump a brave man. At the same time, he also noted that his former and future office partner had been cornered during his first presidential term, and that he was “afraid to take a single step”.
About the course of the war in Ukraine, he said that near Kupyansk, Russian forces surrounded a group of 10,000 and 5,000 Ukrainians. According to Putin, Ukrainian troops are trying to establish pontoon crossings for retreat, but they are destroyed by Russian artillery. He reiterated that he is ready to discuss the settlement with Ukraine, based on the agreements reached in Istanbul in the spring of 2022.
Putin named the six principles that, according to him, should form the basis of the relations between the countries in the new historical stage of development. First of all, he mentioned the openness of countries and peoples to cooperation and condemned attempts to set up artificial barriers. As the second basic principle, he spoke about the fact that the diversity of the world can be maintained if the model of a country or a small part of the population is not imposed on others, if the model of a small part of the population is not declared universal.
The Russian president’s third principle is maximum representativeness, full participation in collective decisions, which he contrasted with someone usurping the right to speak and act on behalf of others.
“The key principle: security for everyone, without exception. The security of some cannot be ensured at the expense of the security of others. But I am not saying anything new here, it is all included in the OSCE documents, it just needs to be implemented,” he said, calling the bloc approach a legacy of the Cold War.
The fifth principle is “justice for all”, in connection with which he touched on the inequality that creates social tension within the countries, and on the international level, the difference in the level of development between the “golden billion” and the rest of humanity, which above all leads to the deepening of the migration problem. Finally, closing the line, he said that a sustainable international agreement can only be based on the principles of sovereign equality.
He voiced his opinion that
the most harmful and destructive thing in today’s world is arrogance and the desire for endless and obsessive teaching.
“We can boldly say and repeat, we are not only fighting for our own freedom, not only for our rights, not only for our sovereignty. We are defending universal rights and freedoms, the possibility of existence and development of the absolute majority of states,” said the president, who previously stated that if necessary, Russia will defend itself and its citizens.
“It is pointless to put pressure on Russia, but we are always ready for an agreement,” Putin said.
He warned: Western calls for the strategic defeat of nuclear power Russia show limitless adventurism, and the politicians’ belief in their own impunity can lead to a global tragedy.
“International conflicts and clashes threaten each other with mutual destruction. After all, there is a weapon suitable for this, which is constantly being perfected and which takes on new forms with the development of technology,” Putin said.
“And the club of owners of such a weapon is expanding. And no one guarantees that it will not be used in the event of an avalanche of threats and the final destruction of legal and moral standards,” added the Russian president, who said that the West’s monopoly of power was in danger.
“Today, there is only one block left in the world, which is welded together by so-called regulation, rigid ideological dogmas and clichés. This is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which, without stopping its expansion in the eastern part of Europe, is now trying to expand to other areas of the world. approach, violating its own basic rules. This is simply an honest anachronism,” was Putin’s explanation.
He called NATO‘s eastern expansion a stealth intervention. He named the lack of trust as the most important problem in relations between Russia and European countries. He recalled the admission of former European leaders that the Minsk agreements on the settlement in Ukraine were signed only to mislead Moscow so that Ukraine could rearm.
According to his position, it is necessary to return to the system of mutual trust, because “this is the first step towards the creation of the Eurasian security system”, concluded Putin.
He said he could count the decent and consistent politicians in Europe on one hand. However, he only mentioned former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder by name.
