By Vladimir Soldatkin
SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia will respond swiftly if it thinks Europe is provoking it and said that almost all of the U.S.-led NATO alliance was now fighting against Russia over Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine, Europe’s deadliest since World War Two, has sparked the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Putin, speaking at the Valdai Discussion Group in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, said Russian forces were advancing along the entire front in Ukraine.
“All the NATO countries are fighting with us,” Putin said.
NATO members, he said, were providing Ukraine with intelligence, weapons and training. Should Europe provoke Russia, he said, the response would be swift.
“If anyone still has a desire to compete with us in the military sphere, as we say, feel free, let them try,” Putin said. “Russia’s countermeasures will not be long in coming.”
Putin dismissed U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that Russia was “a paper tiger”, saying Russia had the most capable army in the world.
He suggested that if Russia was a paper tiger then NATO was too and challenged the West to deal with the paper tiger if that was what it thought it was up against.
‘PAPER TIGER’?
Russia, Putin said, had shown over the centuries that it would respond quickly if provoked. ,
“The elites of united Europe continue to whip up hysteria,” he said. “It turns out that war with the Russians is almost on the threshold. They repeat this nonsense, this mantra over and over again.”
He dismissed the idea that Russia would one day attack a member of the NATO military alliance as “impossible to believe”.
“Genuinely, I just want to say: cool down, sleep calmly, and take care of your own problems. Just take a look at what’s happening on the streets of European cities,” Putin said.
Western European leaders and Ukraine cast the war as an imperial-style land grab and have repeatedly vowed to defeat Russian forces. They argue that unless Russia is defeated, Putin will risk an attack on a NATO member.
Putin portrays the war as a watershed moment in Moscow’s relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Reuters in Moscow; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; editing by Guy Faulconbridge/Mark Trevelyan/Andrew Osborn)
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