“The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv – this is a military confrontation between Russia and Nato, and above all the United States and Britain,” Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev said.

“The Westerners’ plans are to continue to pull Russia apart, and eventually just erase it from the political map of the world,” Patrushev told the Argumenti i Fakti newspaper.

Patrushev, a former Soviet spy who has known Putin since the 1970s, is a hardline ally and seen as one of the few people able to influence the Russian president.

Russia’s Feb 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the deadliest European conflicts since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.