Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that it was pointless to try to put pressure on Russia but that Moscow was always ready to negotiate.“It is useless to put pressure on us. But we are always ready to negotiate with full consideration of mutual legitimate interests. We have been calling for this and we are calling on all participants,” Putin said.Putin said that some in the West dreamed of a world without Russia because they sought world domination but that Russia had repeatedly stopped those who sought global domination.He condemned the United States for seeking to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine and said a struggle was underway to shape a new world order as the Western-dominated post-Cold War era crumbled.“We have come to a dangerous line,” Putin told the Valdai discussion club in this Black Sea resort, a day after learning that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election.“The calls of the West to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, a country with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, demonstrates the exorbitant adventurism of Western politicians,” said Putin.The West had arrogantly sought to cast Russia as a defeated power after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, he said, describing the US-led Nato military alliance as an anachronism.Russia, he said, did not consider Western civilisation to be the enemy despite attempts by the United States and its allies to isolate Moscow.The world was changing in any case, he said, and many powerful countries did not want to isolate Russia.“The former structure of the world is irrevocably disappearing, we can say it has already gone, and a serious, irreconcilable struggle is unfolding for the formation of a new one,” Putin said.“The world needs Russia, and no decisions by supposed superiors in Washington or Brussels can change that.”
