Putin says Russians are united in 'sacred' battle with West over Ukraine
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Transcript
00:00 President Vladimir Putin presided over Russia's Victory Day parade today.
00:04 The celebrations this year in Moscow, though, overshadowed by Russia's battlefield failures
00:09 in Ukraine and the Kremlin's ongoing confrontation with the West.
00:13 Here's more of what Putin had to say earlier.
00:19 The elite in the West, they keep talking of their exceptionalism.
00:26 They are forcing their will on other nations, forcing their rules on others.
00:38 But it would appear that they have forgotten what Nazism was all about.
00:47 France 24's Philip Turrell was listening into that speech from Vladimir Putin.
00:50 He joins me now on the set to get a bit more analysis.
00:53 Philip, what else did Putin have to say today?
00:55 Well, the bottom line here, I don't think anybody was surprised by what Vladimir Putin
00:59 said or what he was going to say before this speech took place.
01:02 It was expected he was going to lambast the West and point the finger at the West as being
01:06 responsible for the current situation and the West trying to destroy Russia.
01:12 These are all messages that came out of this speech.
01:15 Russophobia basically is what Vladimir Putin was talking about, saying the West wanted
01:21 the fall of their country and that there were two other messages which were quite interesting.
01:27 The first one was that, as you know, he has portrayed the Ukrainians as being the hostages
01:33 of the West, saying they were just puppets being orchestrated by the West, which, of
01:38 course, is a message that doesn't really ring true.
01:40 If you think that when Russia started this so-called special military operation, they
01:45 were expecting to walk in there and be greeted with open arms by the Ukrainians.
01:48 Well, that hasn't happened.
01:49 The Ukrainians have been fighting back ever since that special military operation, which
01:54 everyone else calls a war, started on February the 24th last year.
01:59 Another message that was quite interesting was that he singled out three countries, the
02:03 United States, the United Kingdom and China, in the speech.
02:07 I think basically because the United States and the United Kingdom are the two biggest
02:12 providers of military material to the Ukrainians, by far more from the United States and the
02:18 UK, but they are the top two, and attempting to divide opinion over those countries.
02:25 And the second country, or third country, was China, which is the country that Vladimir
02:32 Putin is trying to bring on board to supply weapons to the Russians to help them in the
02:36 fight in Ukraine, paying tribute to the war dead in those countries, saying that he honoured
02:41 the war dead in those countries.
02:44 And one other point which was interesting is that Vladimir Putin said that the West
02:49 had destroyed family values.
02:51 It's almost as if he's saying that because the West has legalised same-sex marriage and
02:57 that kind of thing, that there is a certain debauchery going on in the West and we have
03:01 to fight against the fact that they're trying to destroy family values, which make people
03:07 human and forcing their rules on others, which is exactly what Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin
03:13 are trying to do in Russia.
03:14 So that was the message coming out from the Russian president during his speech, which
03:19 actually was very short, just about 10 minutes.
03:21 All right, Philip, thank you so much for that.
03:23 France 24's Philip Turrell.