“The US government’s blame for these developments [the conflict in Ukraine] is substantial and self-evident for the whole world,” Sergey Naryshkin said in New Delhi at a roundtable on Russian-Indian cooperation which was part of a BRICS project.
The economic sanctions against Russia imposed “by the United States and its satellites” are meant to deflect the blame away from Ukraine’s crisis, Naryshkin added. The Russian Parliament’s speaker reiterated that the anti-Russian sanctions were a tool of “economic blackmail that has nothing to do with the norms of international law”.
Earlier in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin once again reiterated that the Ukrainian standoff was not caused by Russia, but emerged as a response to the attempts of the United States and its allies to impose their will on other states.
As for the sanctions, Putin called them a feeble attempt to isolate Russia and dismissed the risk of "catastrophic consequences" for the Russian economy.