Putin: “Americans are printing dollars and have turned their national currency into a global currency… the printing machine is held by them and they’re obviously capitalizing on this.”

Vladimir Putin: We are strong because we are right

The Russian president in the TASS special project Top Officials
…
- From Luhansk.
– OK, from Luhansk. You definitely know that if you ask a person, whose ethnicity is identified in his passport as Ukrainian, you’ll see he doesn’t give much thought to it. People there perceive themselves as parts of the greater Russian world. No doubt, the Ukrainian nation has its original culture, language, and self-identity – unique, with marvelous sounding, and very beautiful. But fairly recently a colleague of mine showed me documents dating back to 1924. The word ‘Velikoross’ (‘Great Russian’) was entered in a passport. And today Ukrainians would have written ‘Maloross’ (’Little Russian’). There was no difference in practical terms. We are told, why are you pressing forward with the idea of the Russian world all the time, what if people don’t want to live in it? No one is pressing forward with it, which doesn’t mean however that it does not exist.
When I speak to people from Crimea, for example, or from the east of Ukraine, I ask them “What is your nationality?” Some of them tell me, “We don’t draw any difference.” But when Russia begins to speak about it and to defend people and its own interests, it turns into a bad guy at once. And do you think it’s the east of Ukraine that really matters? Does the problem lurk in our position on eastern Ukraine or Crimea? Not at all. Were it not this particular pretext, any other would be found. And this has always been so.
Take a look at our millennium-long history. As soon as we rise, some other nations immediately feel the urge to push Russia aside, to put it “where it belongs,” to slow it down. How old is the theory of containment? We tend to think it dates back to the Soviet era but, however, it is centuries-old. But we shouldn’t fan any passions over it on our side because that’s how the world is functioning. It implies the struggle for geopolitical interests and, consequently, the nation’s significance, as well as the ability to generate a new economy, to resolve social problems, and to improve living standards. This position is not aggressive a bit. But if you take the United States, our American friends…
- Friends?
- Surely, they’re all our friends. Americans are printing dollars and have turned their national currency into a global currency, although they gave up the gold equivalent several decades ago. But all the same, the printing machine is held by them and they’re obviously capitalizing on this.
- Good guys!
– Good guys. But why did this happen? The US achieved a certain position after World War Two. Why do I say this? The struggle for geopolitical interests leads to the situation when a country either becomes stronger, resolving its financial, defense, economic and subsequently social issues more effectively, or slides into the category of third-, fifth-rate countries, losing a possibility to safeguard the interests of its people.
http://en.tass.ru/russia/761152?page=3