And not even a whiff of irony in Putin’s views

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sharply criticises countries that he said were trying to “impose their dominance” and rules on others, saying that those that do were “completely ignoring the sovereignty’ of other states.

Speaking at a conference on security issues, Putin said the world was becoming increasingly unstable and that “new centres of tension are emerging”.

He laid the blame for this new era of turbulence at the door of unspeci ed “individual countries and associations” — widely understood to refer to Russia’s rivals in the West and NATO — that he said were trying “to preserve, retain their dominance, impose their own rules, completely ignoring the sovereignty, national interests, traditions of other states.

“All this is accompanied by a build-up of military potential, unceremonious interference in the internal a airs of other countries,” Putin said, “as well as attempts to extract unilateral advantages from the energy and food crises provoked by a number of Western states.” ere was not a whi of irony from Putin, a leader who over his 23 years in power in Russia has overseen a systematic programme of interference in other countries’ internal a airs and sovereignty, most recently, in Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine 15 months ago.

Before the invasion, there had been numerous instanc- es of Russia interfering in the internal a airs of other countries, ranging from the state-sponsored use of cyberattacks and spread of disinformation to attempts to in uence the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016 meddling in the U. election of the same year (and, again, in 2020) with Russia denying the charges but earning itself sanctions nonetheless.

Russia has also been accused of supporting both farright and far-left parties in continental Europe in a bid to destabilise regional politics and, more recently, has launched charm o ensives in African and Latin American countries in an e ort to in uence domestic and foreign policy.

Russia’s interference has also veered into the dangerous realm of chemical weapons and assassination attempts on foreign soil. In 2018, the Kremlin was widely believed to have ordered a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in the UK, an attack that left a British citizen dead.

Again, Russia denied any involvement in the poisoning but, with much evidence supporting the allegation, Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia for the incident which Britain saw was “an assault on U.K. sovereignty”. It is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year that’s widely seen as one of most egregious instances of “ignoring the sovereignty” of another country in the 21st century, however.