Putin 'Lives in His Own World,' Says US State Secretary

Russia's President Vladimir Putin "is creating his own reality, and his sort of world", the US State Secretary John Kerry said late on Monday.

His words, which he addressed in an interview for the Wall Street Journal, come in the midst of rhetoric reinforcement from both the West and Russia over the Ukrainian crisis.

Kerry also holds that Putin is "divorced from a lot of what's real on the ground for all those people, including people in his own country".

Commenting on fresh US sanctions announced earlier against Russia, the US State Secretary said his country was "inches away" from adopting measures that comprise penalties on whole sectors of Russia's economy like energy, finance, or defense.

Current measures involve only restrictions, such as asset freezing, on individuals or single companies.

He claimed Russia was already being affected by Western sanctions, which were "biting at the top end of the Russian economic and political power structure".

Describing the Ukraine crisis as an "obviously very personally driven" event "uniquely inappropriate to 21st century leadership", Kerry stressed it was "an amazing display of a kind of personal reaction to something that just doesn't fit into the lessons learned for the last 60 years or 70 years".

Russia's rhetoric on the developments in Ukraine, on the other hand, has not been any softer recently.

Sergei Ryabkov, the country's Deputy Foreign Minister, was quoted by ITAR-TASS as saying that "Iron Curtain"-style measures were had been adopted by the US, as he was referring to Washington's latest sanctions.

He added that the EU was "under Washington's thumb" on that issue.

Unrest meanwhile continues in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists seized a government headquarters building in Luhansk.

Rebels in towns and cities across the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk demand that a referendum be held as to whether their territories should join Russia, as the Crimean peninsula did after a local poll on March 16.

We need your support so Novinite.com can keep delivering news and information about Bulgaria! Thank you!