MOSCOW, June 15. /TASS/. Russia must rely on its traditional values to preserve its identity, otherwise it will simply disappear, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"I just assumed that if we don’t rely on our traditional values, we will simply be gone. Russia will lose its identity, and this is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the country’s future," he said in an interview with VGTRK journalist Pavel Zarubin, explaining the ban on promoting non-traditional relationships among children.
The fragment was published on the reporter’s Telegram channel.
This was discussed in the context of a ban on promotion of non-traditional relationships, including among minors. The first such federal initiative was adopted in 2013. Commenting on Zarubin's words that 12 years ago Russia acted contrary to the "Western mainstream," Putin remarked: "When I talked about this, I didn't do it out of a sense of some kind of internal protest, out of a desire to argue with someone or show a Fronde to this mainstream. Not at all."
He explained that all the peoples of Russia, living on the same territory for centuries, have a common moral principle, despite ethnic and religious differences.
"These moral principles are based on our traditional values. Their loss is very dangerous from the point of view of preserving identity and, as a result, the statehood itself. That's why I started talking about it when I saw that there was some kind of movement going on inside the country, inside society, if you want to appear civilized, quasi-civilized, to introduce those little ideas of the Western mainstream into the consciousness of the peoples of the Russian Federation. Not because I decided to argue with someone. To prevent the collapse of the Russian statehood from within," the president summed up.