Putin says West is playing dangerous geopolitical game

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin scolded the West on Thursday (Oct 27) for playing what he cast as a "dangerous, bloody and dirty" geopolitical game, but said the United States and its allies would ultimately have to talk to Russia.

"Power over the world is what the so-called West has put on the line in its game — but the game is dangerous, bloody and I would say dirty," Mr Putin told the Valdai Discussion Club. "The sower of the wind, as they say, will reap the storm."

"I have always believed and believe in common sense so I am convinced that sooner or later the new centres of the multipolar world order and the West will have to start an equal conversation about the future we share — and the earlier the better," Mr Putin said.

Mr Putin said the West, blinded by colonialism, had helped incite the conflict in Ukraine and was seeking to stoke a crisis over Taiwan in an attempt to enforce global dominance.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on Feb 24, triggering the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the depths of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States came closest to nuclear war.

Quoting a 1978 Harvard lecture by Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mr Putin said the West was openly racist and looked down on other peoples of the world.

"Confidence in their infallibility is a very dangerous state," Mr Putin said, adding that Russia would never accept the West trying to tell Russia how to act. "Unlike the West, we do not climb into other peoples' yards."

Still, speaking to experts from 44 different countries, Mr Putin said that Russia did not consider itself an enemy of the West.