“The coronavirus pandemic has become a major challenge to mankind, and it has accelerated structural changes, the preconditions for which were already in place,” he said at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
“We have every reason to believe that the tensions might be aggravated even further,” Putin warned, citing experts that have likened the current state of global affairs to the 1920s and 1930s and that parallels could be drawn between then and now when it comes to the scale and scope of what he called systemic “challenges and potential threats.”
He said the crisis had increased social stratification, populism, right- and left-wing radicalism, adding that domestic political processes were becoming more violent.
“All of this cannot but impact international relations, making them less stable and predictable,” he said, according to a translation.
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