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December 21, 2018

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Putin fronts media in end-of-year briefing

Source: AFP | 00:32 UTC+8 December 21, 2018 | Print Edition

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that the West is trying to hold back an increasingly powerful Russia, during an end-of-year press conference.

Asked about Western sanctions against Moscow, Putin said these were “connected to the growth of Russia’s power.”

“A powerful player appears who needs to be reckoned with, until recently it was thought there was no longer such a country,” he said, from behind a large wooden desk to an audience of hundreds of journalists.

The Russian leader also dismissed spy scandals — such as the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England — as invented to damage Russia’s standing.

“If there hadn’t been the Skripals, they would have made up something else,” he said. “There is only one aim — to hold back Russia’s development.” He later lamented that relations with Britain were at a “dead end.”

Putin began the press conference, as usual, by reeling off economic growth figures.

“The main thing is that we need to get into a new economic league,” he said. “We could very well take the fifth place in terms of size of economy. And I think we’ll do that.”

Russia’s economy is currently ranked 12th in the world by the International Monetary Fund, which lists the United States first, followed by China, Japan, Germany and Britain.

Putin said the economy grew 1.7 percent over the first 10 months of the year, roughly in line with predictions, while unemployment was down. Full-year growth is estimated at 1.8 percent.

Putin was re-elected to a fourth term in March with nearly 77 percent of the vote.

Raising the retirement age this year provoked anger and rare street protests but Putin said the hike was “unavoidable” when questioned on the subject.

Against a backdrop of strained ties with the United States, Putin praised US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria, but at the same time condemned his threat to withdraw from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.

“We are currently looking at a collapse of the international system of arms control,” Putin said, warning that there was a growing tendency to “underestimate” the threat of nuclear war.

Putin dismissed a recent crackdown on Russian rappers as pointless, and condemned the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

And he repeated Kremlin claims that Ukraine’s actions in the Kerch Strait off Crimea were a “provocation.”

Putin’s 14th end-of-year press conference ran to three hours, 43 minutes — roughly an hour shy of the personal record he set in 2008.

The president began the annual press event in 2001. Since 2004, all December press conferences have surpassed three hours.

The conference was shown live on TV.

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