Putin returns to Trump for calling Russia a “paper tiger”

By Vladimir Soldatkin

Sochi, the president of Russia (Reuters), Vladimir Putin, retired on Thursday to the president of the United States, Donald Trump, for calling Russia a “paper tiger” and said that Moscow would respond quickly if he believes that Europe is causing him.

Trump, who had previously said that kyiv should give up the earth to make peace with Moscow, abruptly reversed his rhetoric last week, saying that he thought that Ukraine could recover every territory of Russia and label Moscow as a “paper tiger.” He repeated the line this week.

Putin, speaking in the Valdai discussion group in the Sochi Complex of the Black Sea, said the Russian forces advanced along the entire front in Ukraine, and that almost the entire NATO alliance led by the United States was now fighting Russia.

“A paper tiger. What follows? See and deal with this paper tiger,” Putin said. “Well, if we are fighting with the entire NATO block, we are moving, advancing and feeling safe, and we are a ‘paper tiger’, what is NATO?”

“If someone still has the desire to compete with us in the military sphere, as we say, feel free, try,” Putin said. “Russia’s countermeasures will not be long to arrive.”

“Come, sleep calmly,” Putin tells NATO

NATO members, he said, were providing Ukraine of Intelligence, Weapons and Training, and preparing what he threw as hysteria about the alleged plans of Russia to attack an NATO member, who ruled out as “impossible to believe.”

“I just want to say: cooling, sleeping calmly and peeling your own problems. Just take a look at what is happening in the streets of European cities,” Putin said.

Putin said that the Ukrainian armed forces had a serious lack of labor and defections, while Russia had enough soldiers. He suggested that Kyiv should negotiate the end of war.

Russia, he said, controlled almost the entire Luhansk province, around 81% of the Donetsk region and around 75% of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Moscow said in 2022 having annexed the four regions, and says that the war will not end until Ukraine completely retires from them.

(Vladimir Soldatkin and Reuters report in Moscow; writing of Lucy Papachristou; Guy Faulconbridge/Mark Trevelyan/Andrew Osborn) edition)