Putin: Americans Share Russia's 'Traditional Values'

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that many people in the West, including Americans, share his country's "traditionalist" views on family, gender, and culture.

Putin's remarks amplify Russia's effort to claim the moral high ground in global cultural debates, casting itself as a defender of "traditional values" in contrast to what it portrays as the West's moral decline, Newsweek reported. The Kremlin has long condemned policies on LGBTQ+ rights, gender identity, and reproductive freedoms, using these issues to justify its ideological divide with the West.

In an interview Sunday with VGTRK, a state-owned broadcasting company, Putin said he has been told "all the time by a lot of people, including in the West, that we have people galore who share our position, and there are a lot of them in Western Europe and in America, including North America."

"In any case, I hope that our open, honest, and clear position on these issues has supported those people who thought the same way as us," Putin said in the interview, which was published by the state-owned TASS news outlet.

He said political changes in the West — including the election of President Donald Trump, although he didn't mention Trump specifically — marked a turning point in his country.

"When people, who think like us on the matter, came to power — nothing is totally the same — but they generally share these universal human values," Putin said. "This, of course, was such an impetus for the people in the world as a whole who were sitting there in the rear and just kept quiet about themselves not wanting to face this totalitarian approach on the part of liberal globalists, they have also fearlessly begun to express their point of view, including on the political stage.

"This so-called global liberalism, as I have already said, has outlived itself, in my opinion. It turned from liberalism into totalitarianism."

He said the political situation changing in the U.S., which is "one of the leading countries in the world, has a very large information resource, and influences the global economy and the economies of many countries on the planet greatly," has shown that people who share Russia's values have began to express the these values.