The entire history of the collective West is about “endless expansion,” the Russian president has said
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a plenary session as part of the 20th annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club titled “Fair Multipolarity: How to Ensure Security and Development for Everyone” in Sochi, Krasnodar region, Russia. © Sputnik/Grigory Sysoev
The prosperity of the collective West is largely based upon the “pillage” of its colonies all around the globe, Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed.
The president made the remarks on Thursday as he spoke during the plenary session of the 20th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi.
The entirety of Western history has been about “endless expansion,” and it still pursues such an approach with the whole world to keep its prosperity, he asserted.
“Western influence in the world is a massive military-financial pyramid. It constantly needs new fuel to support itself: natural, technological, human resources belonging to others,” Putin told the plenary session.
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After the end of the Cold War, the collective West, led by the US, has been striving to establish and maintain its global hegemony, Putin noted, adding that such efforts were bound to fail from the beginning.
“The world is too complex and too diverse to be shaped under a single scheme, even if behind it lies the power, the enormous power of the West, accumulated over centuries of colonialism,” he said.
The ongoing global crisis is primarily a result of the “self-confidence” exhibited by the collective West and its refusal to take into account and even to hear the position of other international actors, Putin stated. At the beginning of the 21st century, there was hope that “states and peoples had learned lessons from the costly, destructive military-ideological confrontation of the last century,” but it proved not to be the case, Putin noted.
“Selfishness, conceit, and disregard for real challenges will inevitably lead us into a dead end, as well as the attempt of the stronger to impose their own ideas and interests on others. This should have become obvious to everyone – it should have, but it turned out that it was not the case,” the president stressed.
