IRIA News

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly on February 21, 2023, in Moscow. During his speech, he made a series of claims about the ongoing war in Ukraine and was highly critical of the western countries.

Putin started off his speech by shedding light on Russia’s position in the ongoing war in Ukraine. He claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to “eliminate the threat coming from the neo-Nazi regime that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup.”

Putin’s annual address comes at a time when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is about to complete its one-year anniversary. Following are some major highlights from Putin’s important speech.

Unilateral suspension of the New START treaty

During his speech, Putin also announced that Russia is suspending the New START treaty. “I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the strategic offensive arms treaty,” he said.

The New START treaty caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them. The treaty was signed in Prague in 2010. It came into force the following year and was extended in 2021 for five more years after United States President Joe Biden took office. The treaty was due to expire in 2026.

Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, with close to 6,000 warheads, according to experts. Together, Russia and the United States hold about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, enough to destroy the planet many times over.

Hours after the Russian president concluded his speech, the Russian Foreign Ministry released a clarification on his statement that Moscow is not withdrawing from the treaty but only suspending it. Russia would continue to respect caps on nuclear weapons set under the treaty.

Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement added that Russia would continue to exchange information about test launches of ballistic missiles. The ministry also said that Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the treaty could be reversed, and urged Washington to de-escalate tensions.

“West and Ukrainian Elite are responsible for this war”

Putin was highly critical of the western countries and the Ukrainian elite during his speech. He blamed these factions to be responsible for the war. He said that western countries and Ukrainian elites “just tried to use these principles of democracy and freedom to defend their totalitarian values and they tried to distract people’s attention from corruption scandals from economic-social problems.”

He further added that “the responsibility is on the West and the Ukrainian elite and government, which does not serve the national interest, but of third countries [that] use Ukraine as a military base to fight Russia.” He said that Russia’s war is not against the Ukrainian people. He described Ukrainian citizens as the “hostages of the Kyiv regime that occupied Ukraine both economically and politically.”

Reaction to Putin’s speech

Western leaders as well as Ukrainian and NATO officials responded to Putin’s claims about the ongoing war. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that “It is Putin who started this imperial war of conquest. It is Putin who keeps escalating the war.” Stoltenberg also said he regretted Putin’s decision to withdraw Moscow from the New START pact. “With today’s decision on New START the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan reacted to the speech by stating that “nobody is attacking Russia”. Sullivan’s comments came only hours before U.S. President Joe Biden delivered his own speech in Warsaw, Poland, where he met with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda after visiting Kyiv. Sullivan further said that “this was a war of choice. Putin chose to fight it. He could have chosen not to. And he can choose even now to end it, to go home,” Sullivan said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told the media that Putin’s remarks showed that he had lost touch with reality. “He is in a completely different reality, where there is no opportunity to conduct a dialogue about justice and international law,” Podolyak said.