LONDON, Oct 27 (AFP) - President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday (Oct 27) that the world faced the most dangerous decade since World War II as Western elites scrambled to prevent the inevitable crumbling of the global dominance of the United States and its allies.

In one of his longest public appearances since he sent troops into Ukraine on Feb 24, Putin signalled he had no regrets about what he calls "a special operation" and accused the West of inciting the war and of playing a "dangerous, bloody and dirty" game that was sowing chaos across the world.

"The historical period of the West's undivided dominance over world affairs is coming to an end," Putin, Russia's paramount leader, told the Valdai Discussion Club during a session entitled A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone.

"We are standing at a historical frontier: Ahead is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important decade since the end of World War II."

The 70-year-old former KGB spy was more than an hour late to the meeting of Russia experts where he gave a typically scathing interpretation of what he portrayed as Western decadence and decline in the face of rising Asian powers such as China.

He appeared relaxed over more than three and a half hours as he was questioned about fears of nuclear war, his relations with President Xi Jinping, and about how he felt about Russian soldiers killed in the Ukraine war, which he cast "partly" as a civil war, a notion Kyiv rejects.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war, while the West has imposed the most severe sanctions in history on Russia, one of the world's biggest suppliers of natural resources.