MOSCOW, October 17. /TASS/. Western elites spent years teaching Russia about the importance of freedom of speech and competition, and now they are trying to ban and block all of that, President Vladimir Putin said in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of RT.

"For years, they [Western elites] taught us how to live, how the media should work, how to understand democracy and what democracy is. What true freedom of speech is. They convinced us of the importance of competition, pluralism of opinion, and so on," Putin said. "But what happened to these mentors when RT appeared and hundreds of millions of people began watching a channel offering a new interpretation of events? The reaction of these very elites, whom I have already mentioned, was primitive and straightforward: ‘ban, cancel, block’," the Russian leader noted.