Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a change in the world order on Friday in a scathing attack on the US and its leadership of the West. "When they won the Cold War, the US declared themselves God's own representatives on Earth, people who have no responsibilities—only interests," Putin said in his address to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, CNN reports. "They have declared those interests sacred. Now it's one-way traffic, which makes the world unstable." The Kremlin had billed the speech, among the most substantive Putin has given since Russia invaded Ukraine, "as extremely important."
A cyberattack held up the speech by 90 minutes. A Kremlin spokesperson said hackers swamped websites with traffic to disrupt conference systems in a denial of service attack. It's not clear who did it, per NBC News, but the international volunteer group IT Army of Ukraine had called for an attack on the St. Petersburg event. On Friday, the group posted headlines in English from Russia media coverage of the outage on Telegram, adding, "You did a very good job today!"
The invasion of Ukraine, Putin said, was a "lifesaver for the West to blame all the problems on Russia." He attributed the fighting to "the decision of a sovereign country that has an unconditional right ... to defend its security." The Russian president also accused the US of treating other nations like colonies, per CNN. "The European Union has fully lost its sovereignty, and its elites are dancing to someone else's tune, harming their own population," he said, adding that Russia has no objection to Ukraine joining the EU. It's not a "military-political bloc" like NATO, he said. Mostly, Putin proclaimed a turning point. "The previous world order is finished—irrespective of all the efforts to preserve it," he said, "it's a natural way of history." (More Vladimir Putin stories.)
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