Putin denounces the U.S. as a declining world power.

President Vladimir Putin on Friday reprised his critique of the United States as a declining power that treats its allies as colonies, while declaring itself exceptional and “the messenger of the Lord on Earth.”

“If they are exceptional, then that means that everyone else is second-class,” Mr. Putin said of the United States in an address that the Kremlin had billed as “extremely important” at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — an annual business conference once known as “Russia’s Davos.”

His remarks were delayed by over an hour after the Kremlin cited “large-scale” distributed denial-of-service cyberattacks on the conference’s computer systems. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said the attacks had taken out of commission the database of conference participants, complicating the process of screening the guests entering the plenary session at which Mr. Putin was to speak. Read more

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