Putin Pledges to Battle the ‘Satanism’ of the United States

President Vladimir Putin on Friday asserted that Russia would take control of four Ukrainian regions and decried the United States for “Satanism” and “neocolonial hegemony” in a speech that marked a new escalation in Moscow’s seven-month war against Ukraine and positioned Russia, in starkly confrontational terms, as fighting an existential battle with Western elites he deemed “the enemy,” the New York Times reports.

“Even by Mr. Putin’s increasingly antagonistic standards, the speech was extraordinary, mixing riffs against Western attitudes on gender identity with an appeal to the world to see Russia as the leader of an uprising against American power.”