THE West has reacted to Russian President Vladimir Putin's anti-US tirade, with Washington saying he was out of step with the times, while some Europeans see it as a wake-up call from a tougher Russia.Putin's charge that Washington was fuelling a nuclear arms race in a quest to subjugate the world to “one single master” stunned a conference of top security officials in Munich on Saturday.
Yet while US officials mostly played it down as empty rhetoric divorced from the real world, European listeners said it showed the West must square up to a brash and combative new Russia, both in the Putin era and beyond. “We should take him at his word. This was the real Russia of now, and possibly in four or five years time it could go further in this direction,” Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, at the Munich meeting, said today. “We have to have a dialogue with Russia but we must be hard-nosed and realistic. We must stand up for our values.”