Call Moscow Now Fighting NATO in Ukraine, Former Soviet Spy: Wants to Wipe Russia off the World Map

JAKARTA - A former senior Soviet-era intelligence officer and President Vladimir Putin's closest ally said on Tuesday Moscow was now fighting the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance, accusing the West of trying to wipe Russia off the world political map.

President Putin called the war in Ukraine an existential battle with an aggressive and arrogant West, saying Russia would use all available means to protect itself and its people from any aggressor.

Russia's Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev is seen by diplomats as one of the main hardline influences on President Putin, who has promised victory in Ukraine despite a series of setbacks on the battlefield.

"The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv, this is a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and especially the United States and Britain", Patrushev told the Argumenty i Fakti newspaper in an interview.

"The West plans to continue to separate Russia, and eventually erase it from the world political map", continued Patrushev.

A former Soviet spy who has known Putin since the 1970s, Patrushev's views provide insight into thinking at the highest levels of the Kremlin. He rejected CIA Director William Burns' warning in 2021 against an invasion of Ukraine.

In his Soviet-style analysis of the West, Patrushev characterizes the Western political elite as corrupt, controlled by transnational corporations and business clans that are planning and carrying out "color revolutions" around the world.

"The American state is just a shell for a large corporate conglomerate that rules the country and tries to dominate the world", said Patrushev.

The United States, said Patrushev, has been spreading chaos in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the Middle East, trying for years to undermine Russia's "unique" culture and language.

Russia, he said, was a victim of a Western scheme to push it back to the borders of 15th-century Muscovy, accusing the West of bleeding Ukraine to undermine Russia.

"There is no place for our country in the West", he said.

In response, he said, Russia would achieve economic sovereignty and financial independence, but also build an armed force and special services capable of deterring potential aggressors.

Russian business and private capital, he said, needed to be more "nationally oriented".

"The younger generation should be inspired by creative work ideas for the benefit of our Motherland, and not sit in the offices of Western corporations", said Patrushev.

Separately, the United States disputed Russia's claims that it wanted to destroy the country, the world's largest producer of natural resources, while President Joe Biden warned that conflict between Russia and NATO could trigger a Third World War.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24 sparked one of Europe's deadliest conflicts since the Second World War, the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet Union and the United States came close to going to nuclear war.

The United States and its Western allies have condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a usurpation of imperial lands, while Ukraine has vowed to fight until the last Russian soldier is removed from its territory.