Vladimir Putin addresses the Council for Interethnic Relations on October 31.

During the October 31 meeting of the Inter-ethnic Relations Council of Russia in Astrakhan, Russian President Vladimir Putin talked with scorn about the experience of the European Union countries in dealing with migrant crisis, which in his view has overwhelmed the continent.

He made it clear that hordes of migrants from the Middle East and Africa bring chaos and crime into Europe and says Russia wants none of this. “Let’s rely on our own experience [with regard to the migrant crisis],” he said, “The European one is not the best [for Russia] for now.”

“You can see what is going on there (in Europe),” he continued in front of the camera. “The immigrant raped a child in one of the European countries. The court acquitted him on two grounds – he did not speak well the language of the host country, and he did not understand that a boy – and that was a boy – objected.”

“It cannot even come into the sane mind what they do there [in Europe]”, Mr. Putin said. “This is the result of the erosion of the traditional national values, and I do not know how to explain this – is this the feeling of guilt before these migrants or what? I cannot understand this. But the society that cannot protect its children today does not have tomorrow, does not have a future. So their [European] experience, let’s admit it, is not the best one, but we have a one-thousand-year-old history of creating multi-national state and our experience is much deeper. We have a lot of problems too, we are talking about them here, but [Russian experience] is much deeper and better founded than in many other countries.”

The case Mr. Putin was referring to took place in Austria in December, 2015. Amir A., a 20-year-old refugee from Iraq who came to Austria via the so-called ‘Balkan rout’, leaving behind in Iraq his wife and two kids, raped a 10-year old boy in the restroom of the public pool in Vienna. After having raped the child, he returned to jumping from the high-board. The case was widely reported and unsurprisingly stirred up plenty of local resistance to settling refugees.

The local Land Court sentenced Amir A. to 6 years in jail but the country’s Supreme Court overruled the sentence on the ground of two mitigating circumstances – the 4-months abstinence of the Iraqi migrant, and difficulty in translation that prevented the Iraqi refugee from understanding that the boy did not want to be raped by him.

The case is pending and the child rapist is in jail awaiting new trial.

Before that, in the Austrian city of Saltsburg, a 40-year-old Syrian refugee raped the 4-year-old daughter of the couple he worked for. He was arrested and his case is still under investigation.

This is not the first time Mr. Putin has turned his attention to the migrant crisis that has been unfolding in Europe. In September 2015, for example, he stated that the crisis was “predictable.” He said that its cause was “the wrong foreign policy of the Western partners in the regions of the Muslim world.”