MOSCOW, January 1. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin considers the Western elites who want to dismember the country to be Russia's enemies.
"Ukraine as such is not an enemy for us. But there are those want to destroy Russian statehood, those who want to achieve, as they say, Russia's strategic defeat on the battlefield. Such people are mainly in the West, although in the West there are different people, too. Some sympathize with us, but there are so-called elites for whom the existence of Russia, at least in its current shape, in its current size, as they think, is unacceptable," Putin said at a meeting with military personnel at the Vishnevsky hospital in Moscow.