In a renewed threat to the US-led military alliance NATO against bringing its troops off the “threshold of Russia”, President Vladimir Putin said that Sweden and Finland could go ahead and join NATO, but Moscow would “respond in kind” if they hosted the Alliance’s military forces or infrastructure. Putin condemned NATO’s “imperialist ambitions” and accused the defense bloc of asserting its “supremacy” under the hegemonic US command via Ukraine.

Speaking at the Foreign Intelligence Service’s headquarters on the 100th anniversary of Russia’s illegal intelligence service, Putin also said that the United States and its allies were cynically using Ukraine in their geopolitical game. “The so-called collective West deviates from the fact that there is no alternative to the model of liberal globalism and hegemony will collapse,” Putin said. US-like world order is similar to “neocolonialism” where the rights of other nations are “simply trampled on”.

Putin cited the examples and noted the “fate of many countries” in the Middle East, Libya and other regions, as well as millions of people in Ukraine. He further added that the tactic of flaming the conflict by pumping more weapons in Ukraine aims to “contain Russia” and “stop its development at a rapid pace.” He also stressed that the multipolar world order is developing globally.

‘We have no problem …’: Putin

“With Sweden and Finland, we do not have the problems we have with Ukraine. They want to join NATO, go ahead,” Putin told a state news conference. He also clarified that Finland and Sweden are different from Ukraine. Russia’s president reiterated that Ukraine’s armed forces have carried out an ethnic genocide against the people of Donbass and the Russian-speaking population, for which Russia responded with military intervention. “We have no such problems or problems in Sweden and Finland,” he said.

“But they [Sweden and Finland] “We must understand that there was no threat before, but now, if military contingents and infrastructure are deployed there, we will have to respond in kind and create the same threat to the territories from which threats against us are created,” Putin said.