A screen image from a ceremony held for the "accession" of Ukraine's 4 separatist areas to Russia on September 30, 2022, in Moscow, depicts Vladimir Saldo, Yevgeny Balitsky, Denis Pushilin, Leonid Pasechnik, and Russian President Vladimir Putin reacting.
(REMLIN PRESS OFFICE/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES)
At a ceremony on Friday where he formally proclaimed sovereignty over portions of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin made some of his most venomously anti-Western public comments to date, calling the start of a new anti-colonial revolution against the "doomed" government of the U.S. and its allies.
The embattled leader's comments in front of glum bureaucrats, regional leaders, and religious figures served as the ceremonial culmination of the Kremlin-organized process that finally forced referendums on four oblasts in Ukraine that it partially occupies and yielded astonishingly high levels of accused support for annexation to Russia.
Putin made a lengthy talk in which he hit out at what he saw as the West's expanding power and advocated the creation of "a liberating anti-colonial struggle against unipolar hegemony."
According to a translation of his remarks, Putin remarked, "The West is willing to walk over everything to preserve the neo-colonial system that enables it to parasitize, no, to pillage the world at the expense of the strength of the dollar and technical command."
