President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday reprised his critique of the United States as a declining energy that treats its allies as colonies, whereas declaring itself distinctive and “the messenger of the Lord on Earth.”
“If they are exceptional, then that means that everyone else is second-class,” Mr. Putin mentioned of the United States in an handle that the Kremlin had billed as “extremely important” at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — an annual enterprise convention as soon as recognized as “Russia’s Davos.”
His remarks have been delayed by over an hour after the Kremlin cited “large-scale” distributed denial-of-service cyberattacks on the convention’s pc techniques. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, mentioned the assaults had taken out of fee the database of convention contributors, complicating the technique of screening the company coming into the plenary session at which Mr. Putin was to talk.
Mr. Putin additionally mentioned the European Union had imposed sanctions towards Russia on orders from Washington regardless of the harm to its personal economic system.
“The European Union has completely lost its political sovereignty,” Mr. Putin mentioned, “and its bureaucratic elites are dancing to a stranger’s tunes while accepting everything they are told from above while harming their own public and their own economy.”
He additionally claimed that Western politicians have been falsely blaming inflation of their nations on the struggle in Ukraine to distract the public from what he described as the actual causes: extreme Western authorities spending and unfastened financial coverage.
“We all hear about so called Putin inflation in the West,” Mr. Putin mentioned. “When I see this, I always think: Who’s this meant for, this stupidity? For someone who doesn’t know how to read or write.”
Mr. Putin warned that inflation threatened to trigger “hunger in the poorest countries,” and mentioned, “This will be fully on the conscience of the United States and Euro-bureaucracy.”
IT Army of Ukraine, a “hacktavist” group behind a lot of assaults on Russian web sites, had earlier flagged the financial discussion board as a goal. “The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is starting today, so let’s ‘visit’ it online together,” the group mentioned on its Telegram channel.
Also anticipated to seem onstage have been President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan and Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run tv channel RT. Mr. Peskov mentioned that Xi Jinping, the Chinese chief, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt would handle the convention by video.
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