Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, launched a swingeing attack on Western financial rescue packages yesterday, calling for a new world order to reverse the financial crisis.

On his first visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Putin called the crisis a “perfect storm” that had arisen from a world dominated by the US. He said that only a rebalancing of global power could cure the problem and that financial stimulus packages of the kind agreed by Washington and London could lead them down a path well-worn by Moscow while doing little to aid recovery.

“Interference of the State, the belief in the omnipotence of the State: that is a reaction to market failures,” Mr Putin said in his keynote address at the opening of the four-day meeting. “There is a temptation to expand direct interference of state in economy. In the Soviet Union that became an absolute. We paid a very dear price for that.”

Mr Putin’s speech came as Russia said it was halting plans to site missiles in Europe as a gesture of goodwill to the Obama Administration. Moscow had begun to deploy the weapons in the Baltic as a reaction to the Bush Administration’s decision to forge ahead with a defence shield in Eastern Europe. He offered an olive branch to President Obama, saying: “We wish the new team success. I hope they are willing to co-operate constructively.”

Mr Putin’s main theme was the strengthening of multilateral co-operation to tackle not only the financial crisis but conflicts such as the war in Georgia and the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip — a theme that echoed calls from Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, for an overhaul of international institutions such as the United Nations Security Council to better address the needs of an interconnected world.

There was a danger, Mr Putin said, that military action was being used by countries as “another way of distracting from economic situation”. In solving these regional disputes, he said, “multilateral institutions turned out to be as ineffective as financial institutions . . . We cannot rule out this happening in future.”

The thinly veiled underlying theme was Russia’s return to pre-eminence as a world power as a result of

the diminishing American clout that might result from the global meltdown. On the need for energy independence and security, Mr Putin proposed the expansion of Russian gas and oil supplies to Asia and Europe — a statement that might surprise the Balkan countries that were denied power by Gazprom, of Russia, this month.

He called for the expansion of the range of reserve currencies and said that the diversification of financial centres was an assault on the historical pre-eminence of the US dollar and more recently, the euro, at Russia’s expense. Mr Putin also talked of the need to stabilise oil prices, a reminder of the damage that plummeting crude prices have done to the Russian economy — and to the Prime Minister himself. He is constantly rumoured to be plotting his return to the presidency and has seen his own popularity come under unprecedented assault amid Russia’s economic woes.

Russian military commanders recommended late last year that Moscow should consider scrapping plans to update its nuclear arsenal to properly fund its ailing conventional military. Many analysts see Moscow’s offer to stand down its missiles not so much as an act of goodwill as the result of a cashflow problem.

“Militarisation does not help to solve problems,” Mr Putin told the audience. “We are against spending more money on military efforts.”

His comments on the dangers of state bailouts were well-received by many analysts, who have warned that stimulus packages will fail without a co-ordinated international response to bring in global regulation.

It was an ebullient performance for Mr Putin at a depressed, chagrined Davos. The US is thinly represented, with Mr Obama keeping his top team at home and many bankers out of work.

The appearance of Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, and Mr Putin, on their first visits to Davos, underlined the shifts in global power that the latter sought to highlight. He drew laughs for his mockery of business leaders’ failure to predict the crisis, saying: “As winter comes to Russia unexpectedly every year, it happens this time again with the global economy.”

Yet he bristled at the suggestion that Russia could be helped to build on its technology advances by the outside world. “We are not an invalid, we don’t need help,” he growled. “Pensioners need help, development countries need help. We do not need help.”

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