Russia launched a “special operation” to “stop the war” – Meduza
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia began to stop the hostilities that have been going on in Ukraine since 2014. He announced this at a meeting with veterans of the Great Patriotic War and severe besieged Leningrad, held on January 18 in St. Petersburg. Video with Putin’s statements distributed agency TASS.
“In fact, full-scale terrorist attacks in the Donbass in 2014 did not stop – with the use of equipment, artillery, tanks and operations. It heals everything. Everything that we are doing today, including the special military operation, is, as I have repeatedly said, an attempt to stop this operation. That’s the point of our operation. And these are our people who live there in the territories,” Putin said.
According to the President of the Russian Federation, Russia considers the Donbass to be its historical territories and “historically reconciled” with the fact that after the collapse of the USSR they crossed over to Ukraine. But the Russian government, according to him, “could not fail to respond to what began effectively” in Ukraine after the Euromaidan in 2014 and the change of power, “when it began, in fact, to exterminate people” living in these territories.
Vladimir Putin addedthat the Russian authorities “tolerated” and “tried to negotiate” in order to resolve the situation with world factors, but the Ukrainian side, in his opinion, was going to turn the conflict “into an acute and hot phase.” “Nothing is subject to us, except what we are doing now,” Putin said.
The authorities of Ukraine and Western countries have repeatedly accused Russia of the fact that Russian troops participated in the war in Donbass, which began in 2014. In December 2015 Vladimir Putin declaredthat in the Donbass there are “people who meet in the event of cases in the European sphere”, but he argued that these are not “regular Russian troops”.
In 2021, in a court verdict in Rostov-on-Don found a story about how in 2019 “military units of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”, located in the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR, supplied products from Russia. After media attention, the court clarified that this was mentioned “exclusively in the statements of the defendant.” At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine regarded the court’s decision as evidence of Russia’s participation in the conflict in the Donbass, and the Kremlin announced a “mistake” of the court.