During a meeting he held in the Kremlin with businessmen and was broadcast on television, Putin said that “what is currently happening is a forced measure because they did not leave us any other way to move differently.”
For his part, US President Joe Biden said that Russia bears sole responsibility for the death and destruction that its attack on Ukraine will cause.
On the impact of the Russian attack on the global economy, Putin stressed that his country does not want to harm the global economic system or exclude it from it, at a time when his invasion of Ukraine caused major turmoil in the markets and subjected Moscow to devastating sanctions.
“Russia is still part of the world economy, we don’t intend to harm it. I think our partners should understand (this) and not have the goal of pushing us out of the system,” he said.