Vladimir Putin Uses St. Petersburg Speech to Show that Collective West’s Sanctions Campaign is Destined to Fail

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin used his speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum to blast the collective West’s sanctions crusade against his regime. 

In this speech, Putin stressed that the sanctions levied against Russia will blow up in the EU, the United States, and the rest of the West’s faces. As Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge noted, this pain has become notable with regards to “soaring gas and food prices, inflation fears, and severe supply chain shortages.” 

In this speech, Putin proclaimed that the unipolar order of the 1990s is over. 

Putin said the following:

Over the past decades, new powerful centers have been formed on the planet […] each of them develops their own political system and public institutions, implements their own models of economic growth, and, of course, has the right to protect themselves, to ensure national sovereignty. We are talking about real processes, about truly revolutionary, tectonic changes in geopolitics, global economy, the technological sphere, in the entire system of international relations.

In the initial days of the war, the US and EU leaders bragged about bringing Russia to its knees via sanctions.

However, reality has hit them square in the face with inflation going through the roof and energy costs getting out of control, the latter is particularly pronounced in Europe. 

Putin roughly estimated the costs of the collective West’s “sanctions fever” to be in the neighborhood of $400 billion in 2022 alone. He also called attention to how these punitive economic measures will hurt the working classes of the collective West. 

With regards to the EU, Putin had choice words: 

The European Union has completely lost its political sovereignty, and its bureaucratic elites are dancing to someone else’s tune, accepting whatever they are told from above, causing harm to their own population and their own economy.

The Russian leader declared that there will be a “change of elites” throughout the West as a result of the West’s response to the Russo-Ukrainian War. Namely, the punitive sanctions imposed on Russia. 

“Such a detachment from reality, from the demands of society, will inevitably lead to a surge of populism and the growth of radical movements, to serious social and economic changes, to degradation, and in the near future, to a change of elites,” Putin declared.

“Russia is entering the coming era as a powerful sovereign country. We will definitely use the enormous new opportunities that time opens up for us. And we will become even stronger.”

The Russian leader made it abundantly clear that the economic crises that’s unfolding across the West is the product of home-brewed domestic policies and the misguided sanctions policies towards Russia. 

Putin may actually have a point here. Indeed, Russia’s invasion was an unsavory act of geopolitics. But countries like the United States, which are far away from the conflict and don’t have a pressing national interest in Eastern Europe, have no business trying to punish Russia and launch a proxy war against it. 

It’s simply not worth the economic cost, plus the world does not need a direct military conflict between nuclear powers.

The US and its Western compatriots should recognize their limits and only pursue policies that align with their national interests, and not ideological fixations such as neoconservatism and neoliberalism. 

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