Moscow, Sept. 7, (dpa/GNA) - The sanctions Western countries have laid on Russia for its belligerence towards Ukraine are a “threat to the entire world,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.
After years of threats like the coronavirus, the world is facing new dangers, he said. “I mean the fervour for sanctions in the West and its aggressive attempts to force other countries towards its model of behaviour, to rob them of their sovereignty and to impose their own will on them.”
Western nations hit Russia with a series of sanctions in 2014, after it annexed the Crimean Peninsula. A significantly broader range of sanctions has come to bear since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine started in February.
Since the invasion started, Russia has dug in forces in the Ukraine’s east and south, though Ukraine says it is beginning to launch counter-offensives.
One hotly contested region is the area around the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant. The fighting around an active nuclear plant has sparked serious fears about a nuclear catastrophe.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has called the situation there untenable, sparking the United Nations to call for an end to fighting around the power plant. However, according to the Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has requested more information about the opinion of a team of nuclear experts there.
Russia and Ukraine have traded accusations about who has fired shots at the site for weeks now. Independent confirmation of these accounts is impossible. Russia has occupied the site since early in its invasion of Ukraine.
GNA