“All NATO countries are fighting against us.” Putin threatens with a quick response and causes the West “to deal with the paper tiger”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a meeting with experts in foreign politics, at the Valdai discussion club in Soci resort, from the Black Sea, Russia, on October 2, 2025. Photo: Mikhail Metzel / AP / Profimedia
President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia will respond quickly if he considers Europe and said that almost the entire NATO alliance, now fought against Russia in the context of the Ukraine, writes Reuters.
The Ukraine war, the bloodiest in Europe after World War II, triggered the largest confrontation between Russia and the West of the Cuba Rocket crisis since 1962.
Putin, speaking in the Valdai discussion group in the Black Sea Soci resort, said that Russian forces are advancing along the entire front of Ukraine.
“All NATO countries are fighting against us,” said the Kremlin leader.
NATO member countries, he added, provide Ukraine with information, weapons and training. And if Europe would cause Russia, Putin said, the answer would be quick.
“If someone still wants to compete with us in the military sphere, as we say, it has only to try,” Putin said. “Russia's countermeasures will not be late,” the Russian president said.
Putin also rejected the statements of US President Donald Trump that Russia is “a paper tiger”, saying that Russia has the most capable army in the world.
He suggested that if Russia is a “paper tiger”, then NATO is the same and caused the West “to take care of the paper tiger”, if this considers the military alliance that it has to face.
“Paper tiger”?
Putin said that Russia has shown over the centuries that it will respond quickly if it is provoked.
“The united Europe's elites continue to feed hysteria,” he said. “It seems that the war with the Russians is close to the threshold. They repeat this stupidity, this mantra, again,” added the Kremlin leader.
He rejected the idea that Russia would one day attack a member of the NATO military alliance, considering it “impossible to believe”.
“Honestly, I just want to say: calm down, sleep quietly and take care of your own problems. Just look at what is happening on the streets of European cities,” Putin said.
Leaders in Western Europe and Ukraine consider war as an imperialist territory seizure and have repeatedly promised that they will overcome Russian forces. They claim that if Russia is not defeated, Putin will risk an attack on a NATO member.
Putin describes the war as a decisive moment in Moscow's relations with the West, which, he says, humiliated Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, by expanding NATO and violating what he considers the sphere of influence of Moscow.
