MOSCOW, June 14. /TASS/. Western elites are trying to provide an ideological basis for Russia's dismemberment and have taken a line on the development of Russia's neighboring territories, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the Foreign Ministry's senior staff.
"Today they (Western elites - TASS) are talking about the infamous 'decolonization' of Russia," the president said. "In essence, this is an attempt to create an ideological basis for the dismemberment of our Motherland along national lines. Well, in fact, they have been talking about the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and Russia for a long time. Everyone sitting in this hall is well aware of it," he pointed out. "Implementing this strategy, the Western countries have adopted a line of absorption and military-political development of the territories close to us," the head of state emphasized.
According to Putin, after the end of the Cold War Western elites "set a course for further geopolitical restructuring of the world, for the creation and introduction of the infamous 'rules-based order,' in which strong, sovereign and self-sufficient states simply do not fit," hence the policy of "containment" of Russia. "There have been five and now six waves of NATO expansion," the president recalled. "They tried to turn Ukraine into their bridgehead and make it ‘anti-Russian.’ To achieve these goals, they invested money, resources, bought politicians and entire parties, rewrote history and educational programs, fed and cultivated groups of neo-Nazis and radicals. They did everything to undermine our interstate relations, to divide and set our peoples against each other," he pointed out.