Bisnis, JAKARTA—“You do not consider the situation in the Middle East. Such events will unfold there, and everyone will forget what Ukraine is. It’s going to the Third World War. And Iran is not North Korea, Vietnam, or Kosovo. Here will be the most terrible events” (Vladimir Zhirinovsky, late Russian senior politician).
Zhirinovsky said his piece during a heated debate with fellow European politicians, which aired on a Russian television station before his death from a degenerative disease in 2022.
In that fiery debate, he defended Russia's military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, upholding the operation as Russia's self-defense against NATO's reckless expansion, which, as Russian top leaders claim, threatened Russia’s sovereignty.
Zhirinovsky was one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's far-right supporters, particularly criticizing the unilateral economic and political dominance of the United States globally.
