Russian president Vladimir Putin just shared his rather bewildering hypothesis for why his country is pretty isolated on the world stage right now.
Rather than blaming his brutal, two-year invasion of Ukraine, he claimed it all comes down to “hostile elites”.
While visiting a school on Monday, he said: “We do not reject anything: we don’t have hostile languages, we don’t even have hostile countries.
“We have hostile elites in some countries that have been fighting against Russia for centuries in order to weaken our country because they think it is too big.”
According to Russian state media TASS, Putin added: “They think that they are threatened by a big country like Russia, and they try to slow down our development.”
The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also painted Russia – or rather Putin himself – as more of a victim during an interview over the weekend.
Speaking to the Russian state-owned VGTRK channel, Peskov said: “President Putin is always extremely careful in his remarks about his counterparts.
“He never resorts to rudeness, let alone boorishness, regarding other national leaders.”
Peskov was talking about US president Joe Biden’s 2021 claim that Putin is a “killer”.
He said: “Of course, it is incomprehensible for him [Putin] when other national leaders, let alone the leader of the United States, use such word in their vocabulary when talking about their counterpart.”
Peskov also claimed Biden is trying to make a personal competition between the two of them, but “Putin does not take part in it.”
The president’s attacks on the West in general then became increasingly bizarre on Monday as he claimed the “mass media are free” in Russia, unlike in the West.
He claimed: “Almost all Western countries where our journalists try to work, are creating obstacles for them, banning Russian television channels and directly censoring our media and online resources.
“The West, which claims to be a model of freedom, has opted to hide from inconvenient facts and the truth by launching a blatant bullying campaign against Russian journalists and indiscriminately labelling them as ‘Kremlin propagandists.’”
Controls over the press have only grown since Putin got into power more than two decades ago and almost all independent media outlets have been banned in Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine.
Putin continued by saying: “In Russia, the mass media are free. This is solidly guaranteed by our constitution.”
Putin also had a strange theory about why Ukraine invaded the Russian region of Kursk, and claimed it was because the current government is desperate to stay in power.
“If military operations come to an end, the Ukrainian authorities will have to lift martial law and hold a presidential election right after martial law is lifted,” he said.
He apparently overlooked how Russia is currently holding 18% of Ukraine’s land, which Kyiv says was the main motivation for the incursion.
The Kremlin also coerced voters into supporting Putin in the Russian presidential election earlier this year so he could have a fifth term in power.