Ukraine conflict: Putin likens sanctions on Russia to declaration of war

Russian President Vladimir Putin has allegedly likened the sanctions announced by the West on Russia over attack on Ukraine equivalent to a “declaration of war”.

While speaking to a group of women flight attendants at an Aeroflot training centre near Moscow, the Russian president reportedly said that Ukraine’s leaders would risk the future of their nation’s statehood if they continued to resist Russia’s invasion.

“We could have taken a different course of action," he was quoted as saying.

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"We could have helped the republics of Donbas at the contact line and reinforced them with the Russian army, but in this case, and I mean with the unwavering support from the west, we would have radicals on the other side coming endlessly… with support from the west."

“Our General Staff, the Ministry of Defence, went the other way; the first thing they did was to destroy the entire military infrastructure [of Ukraine], well, not all of it, but partially, mostly. Warehouses with weapons, ammunition, aviation, air defence systems,” he added.

Putin sought to justify the war in Ukraine by repeating his assertion that he was seeking to defend Russian speaking communities there through the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification” of the country.

Several western countries and multinational companies announced economic sanctions ever since Russia launched an all-out war against Ukraine 10 days ago.

On Saturday,Microsoft, Paypal, Samsung, Visa and Mastercard became the latest global brands to suspend trading there.

Apart from that, the western countries, including the US, UK and Germany, have frozen assets of Putin, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and several other Russian oligarchs in response to the war in Ukraine.

They have also placed sanctions on the Russian central bankand removed some of the country’s lenders from the Swift global payments system, in addition to other economic sanctions.

(With inputs from agencies)