MOSCOW, July 8. /TASS/. The collective West unleashed a war in Ukraine and is responsible for unfolding developments, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

"We are being told that we have unleashed the war in Donbass, in Ukraine. No, it was unleashed by the collective West after it had organized and supported the 2014 anti-constitutional armed takeover and then encouraged and justified genocide with regards to the people of Donbass. This collective West, on the whole, is the direct instigator and the culprit of today’s developments," he said at a meeting with the leadership of the lower house of parliament and the leaders of parliamentary factions.

He added that "if this very West wanted to provoke a conflict in order to move on to a new stage of fighting Russia, a new stage of containing our country, then it is possible to say that to a certain extent it succeeded." "Both the war was unleashed and sanctions were introduced. Under normal conditions, probably, it would have been difficult to do even that," the head of state noted.

According to the Russian president, the West should have understood that it had lost from the very onset of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine "because its beginning also indicates the beginning of a cardinal dismantling of the world order US-style, this is the beginning of a shift from the US’ liberal globalist egocentrism to a truly multipolar world."

The head of state added that such a world is based "not on some selfish rules somebody made up for themselves that have nothing behind them except for the aspiration for hegemony, not on hypocritical double standards but on international law, the genuine sovereignty of peoples and civilizations, on their will to follow their historical fate, their values and traditions, to build cooperation based on democracy, justice and equality."

"And it is necessary to understand that it is not possible anymore to stop this process. The course of history is inexorable and the attempts of this collective West to impose its world order are destined to fail," he stressed.