Russian President Vladimir Putin assured yesterday that his country has no “imperial ambitions” and is not planning to attack NATO, more than two years after the Russian military invaded Ukraine.

“Don’t look for something that doesn’t exist (…) don’t look for our imperial ambitions. There are none,” Mr Putin told news agency reporters in response to an AFP question about the flags of modern Russia, Imperial Russia and the USSR being raised in front of Gazprom’s headquarters in St Petersburg where the meeting took place with the journalists.

Mr Putin took the opportunity to denounce Westerners who accuse him of wanting to start a military conflict with NATO, arguing that their countries should therefore prepare.

“They invented that Russia wants to attack NATO (…) Who came up with this nonsense? Bullshit,” he said.

Moscow persisted for months in denying that it was preparing to launch an attack on Ukraine before finally going ahead with the invasion on February 24, 2022, accusing the West of using its ally to weaken and destroy Russia.

Although the Kremlin denies it is seeking to rebuild the lost empire, Moscow has moved to annex five Ukrainian regions that Russian officials, including Mr. Putin, point out were once part of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the Russian president condemned the “complete annihilation of the civilian population” in the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s armed forces have been waging a war against Hamas for the past nine months in retaliation for an unprecedented raid by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s military arm on southern sectors of Israeli territory on October 7.

“What is happening right now in Gaza in response to the terrorist attack on Israel is not like war at all. This is something like a complete annihilation of the civilian population,” Mr Putin told reporters from news agencies including AFP.

“We are trying (…) to influence as much as we can” in the direction of resolving the conflict, “including the humanitarian dimension,” Mr. Putin continued.

He called the Israel-Hamas war “the result of US policy,” which he said “monopolized” efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Russia has traditionally maintained good relations with both the Palestinian Authority and Arab states, as well as with Israel, although relations with the latter have cooled again in the past two years.

Moscow says — something most of the international community agrees with — that the establishment of a Palestinian state is the “most credible” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.