Russian President Vladimir Putin is giving a speech to the Russian people from the floor of the State Duma three days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Putin accused the West of “playing a dirty game” with citizens and with Ukraine but admitted his speech comes at a “very difficult” time for Russia and in a “very difficult environment”.

He blasted the West and NATO, pointing out that they were talking publicly about supplying the Kiev government with nuclear weapons before the start of the war on February 24.

Attempting to justify the “special military operation”, a term Russia uses for the war in Ukraine, he claimed that Russian troops are working “to ensure security” in the “historic land” (n.b. referring to Ukraine).

“We had no doubt that in February 2022 everything was ready for a Kiev operation in Donbas. I say it again, they started the war and we used force to stop it,” Putin added. As he said the goal of the West is to gain supreme power and Sevastopol was the next goal.

Continuing his attack on the West, the president of Russia claimed that he would use any means – terrorists, Nazis, and even the Devil – to fight his country. In Putin’s reading, Ukrainians had become “hostages of their Western masters” who had taken over the country economically, politically, and militarily. “The Kiev regime does not serve the national interests but the interests of foreign powers,” he said. He also accused Western countries of trying to turn a local dispute into a global one, saying “we will respond appropriately. We are talking about the existence of our country.”

He also noted that Moscow is defying Western efforts to destroy Russia’s economy through an unprecedented package of sanctions, underscoring that trillions of dollars are at stake for the West, but income flows to Russia have not dried up.

Russia wanted the conflict in Ukraine to be resolved peacefully, but Western countries had prepared a “different scenario” behind its back, the Russian president also stressed. “We did everything possible to solve this problem peacefully, negotiating for a peaceful resolution of this difficult conflict, but behind our backs, a very different scenario was being prepared,” Putin said.

On the occasion of the recent Munich Security Conference, the Kremlin leader accused the West of unleashing endless accusations against Moscow. “The West has released the genie from the bottle” as a result of the war, and has committed multiple coups, he stressed.