After Week Of Silence, Putin Goads West, Vows Triumph In Ukraine

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday vowed Russia would triumph in all of its "noble" war aims in Ukraine, using his first public comments on the conflict in a week to goad the West for failing to bring Moscow to heel with an economic Blitzkrieg.

Addressing the war in public for the first time since Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine after they were halted at the gates of Kyiv, Putin said the situation in Ukraine was a tragedy.

However Russia had no choice but fight, he said, because it had to defend the Russian speakers of eastern Ukraine and prevent its former Soviet neighbour from becoming an anti-Russian springboard for Moscow's enemies.

Sixty one years to the day since the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, Putin was shown by state television on a visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome 3,450 miles (5550 km) east of Moscow.

Asked by Russian space agency workers if the operation in Ukraine would achieve its goals, Putin said: "Absolutely. I don't have any doubt at all."

"Its goals are absolutely clear and noble," Putin said. "There is no doubt that the goals will be achieved."

"That Blitzkrieg on which our foes were counting on did not work," Putin said of the West's crippling sanctions imposed after Putin's Feb. 24 order for an invasion of Ukraine.

Putin, who says Ukraine and Russia are essentially one people, casts the war as an inevitable confrontation with the United States which he says was threatening Russia by meddling in its back yard.

The West has condemned the war as a brutal imperial-style land grab of a sovereign country. Ukraine says it is fighting for its survival after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and on Feb. 21 recognised two of its rebel regions as sovereign.

Putin, who had been ubiquitous on Russian television in the early days of the war, had largely retreated from public view since Russia's withdrawal from northern Ukraine this month.

His only public appearance in the past week was at the funeral of a nationalist lawmaker, where he did not directly address the war. On Monday he met the visiting chancellor of Austria at a country residence outside Moscow but no images of that meeting were released.

'TOO BIG TO ISOLATE'

Putin drew an analogy between Gagarin's first space flight 61 years ago and Russia's defiance today.

"The sanctions were total, the isolation was complete but the Soviet Union was still first in space," said Putin, 69, recalling his own wonderment as a schoolboy learning of the achievement.

"We don't intend to be isolated," Putin said. "It is impossible to severely isolate anyone in the modern world - especially such a vast country as Russia."

Kremlin chiefs have long cited the Soviet Union's success in space - just over a decade after the devastation of World War Two - as a cautionary tale about Russia's ability to achieve spectacular results against the odds.

Russia's Cold War space successes such as Gagarin's flight and the 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite from earth, have a particular pertinence for Russia: both events shocked the United States.

The launch of Sputnik 1 triggered the public phase of the Cold War space race and prompted U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Still, Russia's economy is tiny compared to that of the superpower Soviet Union - and has fallen behind the United States and China on most technological fronts.

Last year, Russia's nominal economic output was just $1.6 trillion - smaller than Italy's - and only around 7% of the $22.9 trillion U.S. economy.

Russia's economy is on track to contract by more than 10% in 2022, worst since the years following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin said on Tuesday.

(Writing by Guy FaulconbridgeEditing by Peter Graff and Tomasz Janowski)