Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Thursday the last day of the age of “unipolarity,” in a speech delivered at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which lambasted Western countries.
“When they won the Cold War, the US declared themselves God’s own representatives on earth,” Putin told the audience. The much-hyped speech was delayed by more than 90 minutes because of distributed denial of service attacks on its systems. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalists in an impromptu conference call that the speech was postponed due to DDoS attacks on its systems.
It’s not clear who perpetrated the attack. Ukrainian IT Army, a hacker collective, called the St. Petersburg Forum as a target earlier this week on Twitter.
Putin’s address at an annual conference in the western Russian city of Sochi was seen as an opportunity for the world to get some insight into his thinking, following a four-month long conflict with Ukraine. Once Putin took the stage in Sochi, he wasted no time on pleasantries and immediately launched into attacks on the United States and its allies. He said: “They live in the past on their own under their own delusions … They think that … they have won and then everything else is a colony, a back yard. And the people living there are second-class citizens,” adding that Russia’s “special operation” — the phrase the Russian government uses to describe its war on Ukraine — has become a “lifesaver for the West to blame all the problems on Russia.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed the United States and the European Union for rising food prices, saying that a rise in global food costs is due to the “actions of the US administration and the Euro bureaucracy.” The United Nations has said the war in Ukraine has had a devastating impact on supplies and prices, warning it could push up to 49 million more people into famine or famine-like conditions.
The European Commission chief has accused Russia of using food as a weapon of war. Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of stealing Ukrainian grain, accusations that appear to have been confirmed by satellite images showing Russian ships being loaded with Ukrainian grain. On top of that, Russia is blocking maritime access to the Black Sea ports held by Ukraine, meaning that even the grain that is still under Ukrainian control cannot be exported to the many countries that rely on it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Western sanctions for his country’s economic problems, saying that they have not worked out as the West intended. He also accused the West of trying to hurt Russia’s economy by breaking down logistical chains and freezing national assets, but “it has not worked out.” He said that Russian businesspeople are working to normalize the economic situation.