Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken part in a plenary session at this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he revealed that Kiev requested talks through a Russian businessman, only to kill dozens of Russian teenage girls the following day.
During a 45-minute speech and a two-hour questions and answers panel, Putin discussed economic policy, the conflict in Ukraine, and Russia’s deepening relations with China, India, and their BRICS partners.
Here’s what you need to know.
Zelensky’s letter
During the Q&A session, Putin publicly responded to a recent letter from Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, in which Zelensky insulted Putin, threatened Russia with more drone strikes, and then invited Putin to so-called peace talks.
Putin picked the letter apart, questioning Zelensky’s insistence that the EU – and not the US – should provide Ukraine with security guarantees, and pressing the Ukrainian leader on his refusal to hold elections and “usurpation” of power since his term expired in 2024.
Russia is always ready for serious negotiations, he declared, adding that he would not meet Zelensky “just for the sake of meeting.” Putin noted that the last time Russia entered negotiations with Ukraine and its European backers in good faith, the resulting Minsk agreements “were about one thing: that is saving more time for the rearmament of Ukraine. Why would we need anything like this once again?”
Secret talks in Kiev
Putin revealed for the first time that an unnammed businessman called him last month and said that he had been invited to Kiev to meet with Zelensky's officials. Kiev used the meeting as a backchannel to request a sit-down with Putin, but Ukrainian forces struck a college dormitory in Lugansk with multiple waves of kamikaze drones a day later, killing 21 people, mainly teenage girls.
”I asked him, what does it mean? They are asking for a meeting, and they carry out such atrocious, blatant attacks as the killing of children,” Putin recalled his conversation with the businessman after the attack. “They said ‘I've got no explanation’.”
Referring back to the letter, Putin determined that instead of trying “to create an environment for a personal meeting,” Zelensky’s letter was meant “to make sure that no personal meetings can take place at all.”
Russian sovereignty
Throughout his speech and his comments afterwards, Putin repeatedly referred to the concept of sovereignty. Cut off from Western financial and trade institutions, Russia was forced to adapt, on the battlefield and in the economic arena.
”Sovereignty implies being smarter and being stronger,” and not just “the capability to oppose external pressure,” Putin said. “This is about the quality of the government, the economy, and society.”
Putin also reminded Ukraine that sovereignty is essential for military victory. “You have to have your own industrial base for a defense industry. You have to have your own scientific base and your own resource base,” he said. “Russia has all of that. So the sooner those who are fighting us understand that, the better it's going to be for them.”
China and India are ‘strategic partners’
Sovereignty also involves partnerships with like-minded friends, Putin pointed out. Whereas trade between Eurasian nations like Russia and China was once based on “the settlements, logistics, insurance, [and] arbitration” mechanisms governed from “a handful of Western infrastructure hubs,” Moscow and its BRICS partners are building alternative mechanisms.
From now on, Russia will only cooperate with partners – like India and China – “that honor mutual reciprocal obligations and commitments,” he added, before calling on these countries to develop their own financial and technological sectors.
“Russia has learned its lesson,” he said. “We saw that certain suppliers of software left the market. We saw payments blocked. We saw how politics interferes within commercial relations.”
The balance of power is shifting toward the BRICS group, Putin noted, pointing out that BRICS nations account for 49% of global growth over the last five years, while “the contribution of the so-called Group of Seven (G7) is estimated at 18%.”
05 June 2026
After three hours, that's a wrap on the plenary session. Live updates are now finished, but stay with RT for more news, updates, and analysis from the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
Sovereignty wins on the battlefield too, Putin reminds Ukraine:
”You have to have your own industrial base for a defense industry. You have to have your own scientific base and your own resource base,” he says. “Russia has all of that. So the sooner those who are fighting us understand that, the better it's going to be for them.”
Putin has said that if US President Donald Trump had been in office in 2022, the situation in Ukraine “would have turned out differently,” adding that he respects Trump and is grateful for his efforts to bring an end to hostilities. Key issues, however, “must still be resolved directly between Russia and Ukraine,” while the US and other countries can help create conditions and act as guarantors, according to the Russian president.
Trump has repeatedly blamed the Ukraine conflict on his predecessor, Joe Biden, and claimed during his 2024 campaign that he could end it quickly.
Drones are the “new reality” of warfare, but Putin points out one key weakness in Ukraine’s drone-reliant military: “they are supplied to Ukraine from the Western states. In Ukraine, they are only assembled.”
“Although it seems that they try to engineer some of these drones themselves. They're not very successful in that.”
Ukraine’s domestic drone industry has scaled up dramatically since 2022, but it’s also a hotbed of corruption, run by companies that over-promise, under-deliver, and enrich Zelensky’s inner circle. RT covered some of the graft at the country’s biggest defense contractor, Fire Point, in our ‘ State of Corruption’ series.
Putin has accused Ukrainian forces of having “completely lost their minds” by striking the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, saying they hit “right at the reactor,” which is currently shut down. The damage to spent‑fuel storage could spread radiation and it is “by no means certain” any fallout would drift toward Russia, Putin said, warning it could instead reach the EU and that the bloc’s member states backing Kiev “should think carefully about their own security.”
Europe’s largest nuclear plant has come under fire multiple times since Russia took control of the facility in March 2022., including a recent drone hit on the sixth unit’s machine hall that Rosatom called Kiev’s first “deliberate attack” on key equipment – an incident Ukraine denies.
Russia must keep strengthening its air defenses to protect its territory, Putin says, adding: “we have to do everything to ensure the security of the Russian Federation.” He noted that, unlike Ukraine, Russia has the full capabilities to develop its own systems, while the country’s industry and defense science are able to fully equip the military with the tools to counter Ukraine’s drones.
Putin says he has not seen any provocations from Iran that would justify US strikes, adding that Russia hopes the current truce between Washington and Tehran will lead to a lasting peace. He stressed that Moscow is ready to work with all sides to help move toward a settlement, adding that Russia’s earlier proposal to remove enriched uranium from Iran remains on the table.
Putin is bullish on trade with New Delhi, announcing that Russian oil giant Rosneft has invested around $25 billion into a refinery, a port, and gas stations in India. Russia is also working on new technology sharing agreements, he adds.
Russia’s relations with India are “trust-based, brotherly relations in all senses of the word,” Putin says. “We know how talented the Indian people are, how well educated. Indians have great competencies which have achieved world renown, especially in coding and in other fields.”
The West called the idea of denazifying Ukraine “ridiculous,” but Zelensky’s reburial with honors of Nazi collaborator Andrey Melnik proves that the idea is “not ridiculous at all,” Putin says.
Melnik, who co-founded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), was reburied in Ukraine with full state honors last month, in a ceremony attended by Zelensky and his top officials. The OUN and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), massacred around 100,000 Poles and Jews in what is now western Ukraine during the Second World War.
“Just think about it,” Putin tells the audience. “Millions of children and women were killed, burned alive, and those criminals are getting their reburial ceremony with all the owners, and the head of Kiev regime is present there, saluting them, turning the Nazi criminals into heroes. This is what we are fighting against.”
Putin says he won’t be meeting Zelensky, and he shouldn’t even be addressing him. “The ones to be addressed are our combatants, our soldiers at the line of contact,” he says, telling them “the country is proud of you and places its hopes on you.”
Putin ends with an iconic Russian military catchphrase: “Работайте, братья!” (“Work, brothers!”)
Putin reveals for the first time that an unnamed Russian businessman was in Kiev last month speaking to the Ukrainian government as an unofficial envoy. Despite the Ukrainian side requesting the meeting, Ukrainian forces struck a school in Lugansk with multiple waves of kamikaze drones a day later, killing 21 people, mainly teenage girls.
”I asked him, what does it mean? They are asking for a meeting, and they carry out such atrocious, blatant attacks as the killing of children,” Putin recalls. ”They said ‘I've got no explanation’.”
“So this letter that you mentioned, indeed, it is rude. What is this letter about? Is it a means to create an environment for a personal meeting, or maybe is this letter meant to make sure that no personal meetings can take place at all. I think it's the second.”
There’s plenty to pick apart in Zelensky’s letter, and Putin doesn’t miss his insistence that the EU – and not the US – should provide Ukraine with security guarantees.
“Reliable guarantors are always a welcome thing,” he says, “but why would they deny the American administration this order, and President Trump in particular?”
“I don't quite understand,” he continues. “They do want to get weapons from the US However, they do not want to see the administration of the US or President Trump as a guarantor. And this raises questions.”
Putin is taking questions, and he has some words for Zelensky. He says he sent an official to Ukraine to meet Zelenksy before, and that he would never refuse a meeting with the Ukrainian leader.
”But meeting, you know, just for the sake of meeting, well, I've seen that,” he says, pointing out the “empty shell” of an agreement that was signed with Ukraine and its European guarantors in Minsk in 2014.
“All the Minsk agreements were about one thing. That is saving more time for the rearmament of Ukraine. Why would we need anything like this once again?”
China’s Han Zheng follows, less than a month after he greeted Putin on the tarmac in Beijing. China and Russia, he says, are filling in a “deficit of global leadership,” and are carrying out “an important mission to transform the system of global governance.”
Like Russia, China has pushed for the development of alternatives to the Western-dominated system of world institutions.
“We need to follow genuine multipolar principles,” Han declares. “Equal participation of all countries in global governance, and democratization of world relations.”
“The world is moving faster,” and “developing countries need to keep the pace,” Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan says, in a speech declaring the African nation “open for business” and investment.
Hassan already met Putin on Wednesday, becoming the first Tanzanian leader in 55 years to visit the Kremlin.
Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev is up next. “Russia is more than a regional neighbor for Uzbekistan,” he says. “It is our time-tested strategic partner and ally.”
Mirziyoyev takes a moment to mark a decade of “systemic reforms” in Uzbekistan, hailing economic growth of almost 150% since 2016.
Putin’s speech clocked in at 45 minutes, most of it laying out his vision of a sovereign Russia, interconnected with key strategic partners in the BRICS group and beyond.
Here’s a key takeaway from RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan: “Putin reminds everybody that giving everything to the Globalist institutions was like turning your entire country into a smart home, but the master account belonged to your neighbor.”
Putin has dropped a slew of statistics on inflation, employment, GDP growth, and trade flows with BRICS and the global south, but here’s an impressive figure: more than 80% of all global nuclear power plant construction is conducted with the participation of Russia’s state nuclear power agency, Rosatom.
”More than 80%,” Putin emphasizes. “Which is a very significant figure.”
“Sovereignty implies being smarter and being stronger,” and not just “the capability to oppose external pressure,” Putin says. “This is about the quality of the government, the economy, and society.”
The Russian president is developing a complete theory of sovereignty, and it’s one born of necessity since 2022. He admits that Russia’s economic growth has slowed, but points out that industrial production has grown despite sanctions and conflict.
”We hear certain criticisms, from all parts, saying that we’re going down,” he says. “Yes, but we have only gone down to the very level at which the eurozone countries have been living for all these past years.”
Russia and its partners need to keep developing their own technological sectors, without which “real sovereignty is going to be unachievable,” Putin says. “Russia has learned its lesson. We saw that certain suppliers of software left the market. We saw payments blocked. We saw how politics interferes within commercial relations.”
From now on, Russia will only cooperate with partners – like India and China – “that honor mutual reciprocal obligations and commitments,” he adds.
Why are BRICS nations moving away from Western-dominated currencies and trade mechanisms? Because “sanctions and basically the theft of Russia's international reserves has had an irreversible effect on the positions of the world currencies, namely the US dollar and euro,” Putin reminds the audience.
If Russia can “lose access to the Western financial and payment infrastructure,” he says, this system can be wielded against anyone.
Sovereignty is a key theme of Putin’s speech so far, and the Russian president is pushing the development of parallel institutions free of Western control. In the past, he says, trade between Eurasian nations like Russia and China were still based on “the settlements, logistics, insurance, [and] arbitration” mechanisms governed from “a handful of Western infrastructure hubs.”
“Right now, international trade is becoming increasingly efficient” without these intermediaries, he declares.
As Europe declines, Russia and its partners benefit from the shift to multipolarity, Putin says. “New centers of growth want to select their trajectory of development on their own,” he states, pointing out that BRICS nations account for 49% of global growth over the last five years, while “the contribution of the so-called Group of Seven (G7) is estimated at 18%.”
Intra-BRICS trade, meanwhile, has exceeded $1 trillion per year.
Putin cuts straight to hard politics, bringing up the crisis in the Middle East and Europe’s “short-sighted” energy policies. The EU’s abandonment of Russian energy and “aggressive rhetoric,” he says, have led to “further loss of Europe’s position in the world economy.”
"European elites are provoking chaos and they are trying to plunge more and more countries into this chaos," he continues, diving deeper into grand geopolitics. "This is the consequence of the fact that over the last decades, the world is undergoing the most profound structural transformation, which is not a transition from one stage to another of the cycle. The very paradigm of global development is shifting."
Putin has just taken the stage along with Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, and Chinese Vice President Han Zheng.
Expect speeches, followed by a lengthy questions and answers session.
Among the attendees waiting for Putin is Robert Agee, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia. Agee says that most of the American businesses present in Russia before 2022 have stayed, and they’re looking forward to a return to business as usual.
”Let's try to end the conflict first, then we can remove the sanctions, and then we can have our businesses return,” he says.
The plenary session will be moderated by Indian journalist Geeta Mohan, who interviewed Putin for India Today before his state visit to New Delhi last year.
From his thousand-year history lesson to Tucker Carlson, to his five-hour New Year’s press conferences, Putin is known for his ability to talk at length, and yesterday’s meeting with news agency chiefs was no exception. In case you missed the two-hour session, RT gathered the highlights here.
Putin acknowledged the tough measures Moscow has made to battle inflation, but channeled Mark Twain when he pointed out that rumors of the Russian economy’s death “have been greatly exaggerated.”
The Russian president drew attention to Ukraine’s steep losses on the battlefield, and in a reminder to Kiev and its Western backers, noted that Russia’s ‘Oreshnik’ missile system has not yet been used “in the full sense of the word on Ukrainian territory.”
Russia is ready for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, he added, provided that the US and EU manage to convince Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky to accept the compromises agreed on with US President Donald Trump in Anchorage last year. Whether Zelensky – whose term expired in 2024 – signs the papers, he noted, is “a question for lawyers.”
Good afternoon, and welcome to RT’s coverage of the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). The event is due to begin at any moment, but Putin often likes to keep his audience waiting. We’ll be live-blogging throughout the roughly two-hour session, so watch this space.