Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to have compared Russia’s sanctions imposed by the West in response to the attack on Ukraine to a “declaration of war.”
“We could have helped the republics of Donbas at the contact line and reinforced them with the Russian army, but in this case, and I mean with the unwavering support from the west, we would have radicals on the other side coming endlessly… with support from the west.”
The Russian president reportedly told a group of female flight attendants at an Aeroflot training center in Moscow that if Ukraine’s authorities continued to reject Russia’s invasion, their country’s statehood would be jeopardized.
Putin tried to justify the war in Ukraine by repeating his claim that the country needed to be “demilitarized and de-Nazified” in order to protect Russian-speaking areas.
“Our General Staff, the Ministry of Defence, went the other way; the first thing they did was to destroy the entire military infrastructure (of Ukraine), well, not all of it, but partially, mostly. Warehouses with weapons, ammunition, aviation, air defense systems,” he added.
Since Russia launched an all-out attack against Ukraine eleven days ago, several western governments and global corporations have issued economic sanctions.
As sanctions pinch deeper, Microsoft, Paypal, Samsung, Visa, and Mastercard became the latest major brands to halt operations in Russia on Saturday.
Apart from that, in response to the war in Ukraine, western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have frozen the assets of Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and numerous other Russian oligarchs.
Russian banks have also been severely impacted, resulting in billions of dollars in losses, with the long-term effects yet unknown.