President Vladimir V. Putin denied that Russia was preparing to use nuclear weapons on Thursday as he reeled off a familiar litany of criticisms of a “cosmopolitan” Western elite seeking to dominate the rest of the world, using an annual foreign policy speech to try to appeal to conservatives in the United States and Europe.
“We have no need to do this,” Mr. Putin said. “There’s no sense for us, neither political nor military.”
It was unclear if Mr. Putin’s comment was the last word on Moscow’s plans. From the start of the war, Russian officials’ comments have presented a confusing mix of truths, half-truths and outright falsehoods. Officials insisted in February, for instance, that Russia had no intention of invading Ukraine just before Russian troops crossed the border.
During his speech, Mr. Putin maintained that Russia did not fundamentally see itself as an “enemy of the West.” Rather, he said — as he has before — that it was “Western elites” that he was fighting, ones who were trying to impose their “pretty strange” values on everyone else.
“There are at least two Wests,” Mr. Putin said in his speech at the plenary session in Moscow of an annual foreign policy conference. One, he said, was the West of “traditional, mainly Christian values,” which Russia was close to.
“There’s another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite,” he went on.
Mr. Putin, as he often does, portrayed Russia as threatened by the possible expansion of NATO — and the values of its liberal democracies — to former states that were once part of the Soviet Union, like Ukraine.
Ukraine and its allies in the West, however, say Russia’s invasion is an unjustified attempt to seize a sovereign country, which has been independent since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Moscow’s troops rolled into Ukraine on Feb. 24, destroying cities, killing thousands of civilians and setting off the biggest war in Europe since World War II.
Mr. Putin did not mention the upcoming midterm elections in the United States, but his focus on “elites” was a reminder that he still hoped to build alliances with supporters of Russia in the West, and that American and European voters would eventually lose interest in supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. He said he was sure that eventually, the West would be forced to engage Russia and other world powers in talks on a future world order.
“I always believed and believe in the power of common sense,” Mr. Putin said. “I am therefore convinced that sooner or later, the new centers of the multipolar world order and the West will have to start a conversation of equals.”
In a Q. and A. session after the speech, the event’s moderator, the political scientist Fyodor Lukyanov, pressed Mr. Putin on the fact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not appear to have gone according to plan. And he said that there was a widespread view that Russia had “underestimated the enemy.”
“Honestly, society doesn’t understand — what’s the plan?” Mr. Lukyanov asked.
Mr. Putin brushed aside the implicit criticism, arguing that Ukraine’s fierce resistance showed why he was right to launch the invasion. The longer Russia had waited, he said, “the worse it would have been for us, the more difficult and more dangerous.”
Mr. Putin repeated Russia’s unfounded claims that Ukraine was preparing to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” on its territory and blame Moscow. While Mr. Putin has repeatedly hinted that Russia could resort to nuclear weapons in what he has cast as an existential conflict in Ukraine, he insisted on Thursday that it was the West that was increasing nuclear tensions.
“We are being blackmailed,” he said, claiming it was the British and other Western leaders that were threatening Russia with a nuclear attack.
President Biden and other Western leaders have said that it is Russia who has repeatedly raised the possibility of using nuclear weapons and that the unsupported claim that Ukraine is preparing a radiological bomb could be used as a pretext by the Kremlin to escalate the war.
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