Putin says West is ‘exploiting’ Ukraine and using its people as ‘cannon fodder’

2022-12-09

Vladimir Putin has accused the West of using Ukrainians as “cannon fodder” in a proxy war with Russia.

In a video address to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Russian leader said that the US government was trying to “prolong” the war in Ukraine – which he still refers to as a “special military operation”.

He accused the Western powers of cynically using the Ukrainian people “as cannon fodder, as a battering ram against Russia,” and by continuing to supply Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, was driving the country on ”a suicidal path"

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He also accused the West of having encouraged genocide and terrorism in Ukraine’s contested Donbas region.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a pact that comprises China and India as well as a number of former Soviet states, is primarily focused on co-operating again international terrorism and its leaders have repeatedly stressed that it is not a military alliance.

Putin has repeatedly tried to frame the conflict in Ukraine as a Western attack on Russia.

In August, speaking at the Moscow International Security Conference, he accused what he described as "Western globalist elites”of "provoking chaos, inciting old and new conflicts," and attempting "to preserve the hegemony and power that is slipping out of their hands."

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In a swipe at NATO, he claimed that the “so-called collective West” was “deliberately destroying the European security system”.

He said that the US and its allies “crudely interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states,” and said the West had organised "provocations, coups, civil wars” in order to destabilise independent nation states.

At another speech in Moscow, towards the end of October, Putin specifically named short-lived British Prime Minister Liz Truss of engaging in "nuclear blackmail" against Russia, saying she must have been "a bit out of it" when she accused Russia of “sabre-rattling" nuclear threats.

During the speech at the Valdai Discussion Club, he added that Britain and the West were playing a "dangerous, dirty and deadly game" in Ukraine and claimed that the era of western domination was over.

Putin also made bizarre claims about the US making Ukraine a “test site for military biological experiments,” and complained that the West was “pumping [Ukraine] up with weapons” and ignoring “provocations” using a dirty bomb, a conventional explosive carrying radioactive material.

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