Putin: The Israeli response to the Hamas attack is never like war

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday denounced the West’s delivery of long-range weapons to Ukraine and vowed Moscow would provide similar weapons to third countries to attack Western targets.

Putin’s comments came during a meeting with representatives of foreign news agencies, after several Western countries, including the United States, announced their approval of Ukraine launching strikes in Russia, in a move Moscow described as a serious miscalculation.

“If anyone thinks that similar weapons can be provided in the battle zone to strike our territory,” Putin said.

“Why don’t we have the right to send our weapons of the same type to regions of the world where strikes are directed at sensitive facilities of countries acting against Russia?” he added.

“Noting that the response could be uneven… Russia would think about it,” he said.

But Putin called “nonsense” talk suggesting Russian intentions to attack NATO countries.

“Don’t look for what doesn’t exist… Don’t look for our imperialist ambitions because they don’t exist,” he said.

He warned that arming Ukraine by the West was a very negative step and said donors were in control of weapons.

Referring in particular to Germany, Putin stressed that when the first German tanks appeared on Ukrainian soil, it provoked a moral and moral shock in Russia from the past related to World War II.

During the meeting, Putin stressed that his country wasn’t the one who started the war in Ukraine, blaming Kiev for the revolution that brought Western loyalists to power in 2014, and later Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and a Russian-sponsored separatist insurgency.

“Everyone thinks that Russia started the war in Ukraine… I want to stress that no one in the West, in Europe, wants to remember how this tragedy began,” he said.

The Russian president refused to specify his country’s losses in Ukraine, stressing only that they were significantly inferior to the Ukrainian losses, which are one in five.

“If we are talking about irreparable losses (deaths), the ratio is one in five compared to the losses suffered by the Ukrainian side,” he said.

Asked what a victory for any of the presidential candidates in the United States could mean for US-Russian relations, Putin replied, “Overall, there is no difference”.

“We don’t think that after the election, something will change about Russia and in American policy”.

Putin also said the judicial troubles of Donald Trump, who was criminally convicted, were the result of internal political tussle between Democrats and Republicans ahead of November’s US presidential election.

“Their so-called leadership in the field of democracy is burning at its roots,” he said.

Trump last week became the first former US president to be convicted of a criminal offense after a New York Backpackers panel found him guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying account documents at the end of 2016 for concealing money he paid to buy Stormy Daniels’ 2006 sex affair.

Trump, who is running for president in November, has previously called Putin “smart”.

The Russian president said Russia and the United States were in constant contact about a possible exchange deal that would lead to the release of jailed American journalist Ivan Gershkovych, who was arrested on espionage charges last year.

He noted that the relevant agencies of the United States and Russia are in constant contact with each other and stressed that any decision would only be taken on the basis of reciprocity.