The unvarnished truth about the strategic crisis facing the planet was communicated by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the eve of the two-day BRICS Summit, taking place Sept. 12-13 in New Delhi, India. Even before the BRICS proceedings were underway, Putin in effect set the stage for those deliberations in a Sept. 11 response to a question from the media about Germany, warning that the West seems bent on rewriting the history of the defeat of Nazism in World War II. “Now they speak of contemplating the dispatch of troops to the territory of Ukraine. This would mean war with Russia,” Putin stated bluntly.

The Russian President began by refusing to discuss the internal political affairs of Germany, but with a stark strategic diagnosis. “All that is now happening across Europe as a whole is the consequence of systemic errors committed by the so‑called West, or, to be more precise, by the globalist circles of the West, in the political, security and economic spheres.” The error took hold “following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union; they perceived themselves as standing atop the ‘summit of Mount Olympus,’ and evidently concluded that, firstly, they were permitted everything and, secondly, that they themselves were incapable of error. From then on, these mistakes began to accumulate and snowball.”

In the security field, they launched a drive to balkanize and destroy Russia, first “through the use of terrorists in the Caucasus and separatists, then via other methods, and now—by means of the neo‑Nazi regime in Ukraine…. As soon as the regime was changed through, I repeat, a bloody coup d’état, the objective of pulling Ukraine into NATO was immediately set in motion, and this, in fact, became the root cause of today’s tragic events in Ukraine.”

Putin then turned to energy and economics:

“We supplied gas to Europe at a price of $150—well, $180—per 1,000 cubic meters… ‘No,’ they insisted, ‘prices must be set on the exchange.’ We warned them that gas is not a market commodity, or at least not a classic market commodity; this approach will yield nothing and your prices will only increase. And so, it has turned out: prices are now at 1,000 dollars or euros per 1,000 cubic meters. And they may well rise even further…. And why is this so? Those who engage in exchange trading are unconcerned with the technical condition of these storage facilities and the physical volumes involved. They believe that today, it is more advantageous to extract gas from storage that was purchased at lower prices, and as for tomorrow—well, we’ll see.”

Now these elites are trying to frighten the population with “a mythical Russian threat, purportedly dating back to the Soviet era. But such a threat does not exist, and never has. We do not threaten, nor do we intend to threaten, European countries….

“Nonetheless, they persist in this course, demanding certain changes. But what changes do they seek? Are they attempting to revise the results of the Second World War? To what end are they steering their peoples? Toward war with the Russian Federation? Now, they speak of contemplating the dispatch of troops to the territory of Ukraine. This would mean war with Russia. And I presume that European citizens understand what is unfolding.”