PRESIDENT PUTIN’S ADDRESS

The Old Order Is Over, the Path to Building a New Order Is Before Us

Oct. 1—These are excerpts from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address at the signing ceremony of the treaties for the accession of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye Region, and the Kherson Region to the Russian Federation, which took place in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s St. George Hall on Sept. 30.

I have no doubt that the Federal Assembly will support the constitutional laws on the accession to Russia and the establishment of four new regions, our new constituent entities of the Russian Federation, because this is the will of millions of people.… It is undoubtedly their right, an inherent right sealed in Article 1 of the UN Charter, which directly states the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.…

I want the Kiev authorities and their true handlers in the West to hear me now, and I want everyone to remember this: The people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye, have become our citizens, forever.

We call on the Kiev regime to immediately cease fire and all hostilities; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, as we have said more than once. But the choice of the people in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson will not be discussed. The decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it. Kiev’s current authorities should respect this free expression of the people’s will; there is no other way. This is the only way to peace.

We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our nation.

We will definitely rebuild the destroyed cities and towns, the residential buildings, schools, hospitals, theatres, and museums. We will restore and develop industrial enterprises, factories, infrastructure, as well as the social security, pension, healthcare, and education systems.…

Our united people have seen with their own eyes what the ruling class of the so-called West have prepared for humanity as a whole. They have dropped their masks and shown what they are really made of.… In 1991, the West thought that Russia would never rise after such shocks and would fall to pieces on its own. This almost happened. We remember the horrible 1990s, hungry, cold, and hopeless. But Russia remained standing, came alive, grew stronger, and occupied its rightful place in the world.

Meanwhile, the West continued and continues looking for another chance to strike a blow at us, to weaken and break up Russia, which they have always dreamed about, to divide our state and set our peoples against each other, and to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They cannot rest easy knowing that there is such a great country with this huge territory in the world, with its natural wealth, resources, and people who cannot and will not do someone else’s bidding.

The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real, and absolutely self-serving motivation. This is why total de-sovereignization is in their interest. This explains their aggression towards independent states, traditional values, and authentic cultures, their attempts to undermine international and integration processes, new global currencies, and technological development centers they cannot control. It is critically important for them to force all countries to surrender their sovereignty to the United States.…

I want to underscore again that their insatiability and determination to preserve their unfettered dominance are the real causes of the hybrid war that the collective West is waging against Russia. They do not want us to be free; they want us to be a colony. They do not want equal cooperation; they want to loot. They do not want to see us a free society, but a mass of soulless slaves.… They do not want or need Russia, but we do.…

Strategic security agreements have been trashed; agreements reached at the highest political level have been declared tall tales; firm promises not to expand NATO to the east gave way to dirty deception as soon as our former leaders bought into them; missile defense, intermediate-range and shorter-range missile treaties have been unilaterally dismantled under far-fetched pretexts.

And all we hear is, the West is insisting on a rules-based order. Where did that come from anyway? Who has ever seen these rules? Who agreed or approved them? Listen, this is just a lot of nonsense, utter deceit, double standards, or even triple standards! They must think we’re stupid. Russia is a great, thousand-year-old power, a whole civilization, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules.…

It is worth reminding the West that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, followed by the worldwide slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India and Africa, the wars of England and France against China, as a result of which it was forced to open its ports to the opium trade. What they did was get entire nations hooked on drugs and purposefully exterminated entire ethnic groups for the sake of grabbing land and resources, hunting people like animals. This is contrary to human nature, truth, freedom, and justice.

While we—we are proud that in the 20th century our country led the anti-colonial movement, which opened up opportunities for many peoples around the world to make progress, reduce poverty and inequality, and defeat hunger and disease.… This was achieved by creating a strong centralized state in Russia, which grew and got stronger based on the great moral values of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, as well as Russian culture and the Russian word that were open to all.

There were numerous plans to invade Russia.… All of them failed.… We remember. We have not forgotten anything.…

It is their destructive policies, wars and plunder that have unleashed today’s massive wave of migrants. Millions of people endure hardships and humiliation or die by the thousands trying to reach Europe.… In effect, the American elite is using the tragedy of these people to weaken its rivals, to destroy nation states. This goes for Europe and for the identities of France, Italy, Spain, and other countries with centuries-long histories.

Washington demands more and more sanctions against Russia and the majority of European politicians obediently go along with it. They clearly understand that by pressuring the EU to completely give up Russian energy and other resources, the United States is practically pushing Europe toward deindustrialization in a bid to get its hands on the entire European market. These European elites understand everything—they do, but they prefer to serve the interests of others. This is no longer servility but direct betrayal of their own peoples. God bless, it is up to them.

But the Anglo-Saxons believe sanctions are no longer enough and now they have turned to subversion. It seems incredible but it is a fact—by causing explosions on Nord Stream’s international gas pipelines passing along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, they have actually embarked on the destruction of Europe’s entire energy infrastructure. It is clear to everyone who stands to gain. Those who benefit are responsible, of course.

The dictates of the U.S. are backed up by crude force, on the law of the fist.… I believe next in line are other countries of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as current U.S. partners and allies.… They have everything in their sights, including our next-door neighbors—the CIS countries.… Most states refuse to “snap a salute” and instead choose the sensible path of cooperation with Russia. The West clearly did not expect such insubordination.…

The truth has been drowned in an ocean of myths, illusions, and fakes, using extremely aggressive propaganda, lying like Goebbels. The more unbelievable the lie, the quicker people will believe it—that is how they operate, according to this principle.

But people cannot be fed with printed dollars and euros. You can’t feed them with those pieces of paper, and the virtual, inflated capitalization of western social media companies can’t heat their homes. Everything I am saying is important. And what I just said is no less so: You can’t feed anyone with paper—you need food; and you can’t heat anyone’s home with these inflated capitalizations—you need energy.

That is why politicians in Europe have to convince their fellow citizens to eat less, take a shower less often, and dress warmer at home. And those who start asking fair questions like, “Why is that, in fact?” are immediately declared enemies, extremists, and radicals. They point back at Russia and say: that is the source of all your troubles. More lies.

I want to make special note of the fact that there is every reason to believe that the Western elites are not going to look for constructive ways out of the global food and energy crisis that they and they alone are to blame for, as a result of their long-term policy, dating back long before our special military operation in Ukraine, in Donbass.…

Now, in order to free itself from the latest web of challenges, they need to dismantle Russia as well as other states that choose a sovereign path of development, at all costs, to be able to further plunder other nations’ wealth and use it to patch their own holes. If this does not happen, I cannot rule out that they will try to trigger a collapse of the entire system, and blame everything on that, or, God forbid, decide to use the old formula of economic growth through war.

Russia is aware of its responsibility to the international community and will make every effort to ensure that cooler heads prevail.

The current neocolonial model is ultimately doomed; this much is obvious. But I repeat that its real masters will cling to it to the end. They simply have nothing to offer the world except to maintain the same system of plundering and racketeering.…

Let’s answer some very simple questions for ourselves.… Do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three” (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse”—pure Satanism.…

The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation. New centers of power are emerging. They represent the majority—the majority!—of the international community.…

As I have already said, we have many like-minded people in Europe and the United States, and we feel and see their support. An essentially emancipatory, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies. Its power will only grow with time. It is this force that will determine our future geopolitical reality.… The ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible. And I repeat: things will never be the same.…

Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values are humanity, mercy, and compassion.…

The truth is with us, and behind us is Russia!