Russian President Vladimir Putin has said there will be no more wars after Ukraine, if Russia is treated with respect – and dismissed claims that Moscow is planning to attack European countries as “nonsense”.
In a televised event lasting almost four and a half hours, he was asked by the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg whether there would be new “special military operations” – Putin’s term for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“There won’t be any operations if you treat us with respect, if you respect our interests just as we’ve always tried to respect yours,” he asserted.
Earlier this month, Putin said Russia was not planning to go to war with Europe, but was ready “right now” if Europeans wanted to.
Answering a question from the BBC Russia editor on Friday, Putin also added the condition that there would be no further Russian invasions “if you don’t cheat us like you cheated us with Nato’s eastward expansion”.
He has long accused Nato of going back on an alleged 1990 Western promise to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before the fall of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev later denied the remark had been made.
The “Direct Line” marathon combined questions from the public at large and journalists from across Russia in a Moscow hall, with Putin sitting beneath an enormous map of Russia that encompassed occupied areas of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
Russian state TV claimed more than three million questions had been submitted.
Just hours after the televised marathon, Ukrainian officials said seven people were killed and a further 15 injured in a Russian missile strike on Ukraine’s southern Odesa region. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
