Russo-Ukraine War: President Vladimir Putin has bolstered his claims of victory in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian president’s latest statement came on the same day the war-torn nation lost its interior minister and other senior officials in a deadly helicopter crash.
Putin, addressing a meeting with veterans on Wednesday, insisted that Moscow had done its best to prevent its troops from instigating an “operation” against its neighbor but had been left with no other option. Putin said that he had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement before sending in troops, but “we were just tricked and betrayed”.
Moscow has long wanted to negotiate with Ukraine
He claimed that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine were aimed at stopping the “war” that has been going on in eastern Ukraine for several years. According to Putin, on the issue of Donbass, Moscow had been demanding for a long time to hold talks with its neighboring country for the last eight years. The Guardian quoted Putin as saying during the meeting, “Large-scale combat operations involving heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and aircraft have not stopped in Donbass since 2014.”
“Whatever we are doing today as part of the special military operation is an effort to stop this war. That is the meaning of our operation – to protect the people living in those areas,” he said.
Putin explains his decision to send troops to Ukraine
Putin has explained his decision to send troops into Ukraine on 24 February as the need to conduct “militarization” and “anazization” of Ukraine in order to protect Russian-speakers and prevent them from posing a threat to Russia. – a cover for an unprovoked act of aggression in the form of claims rejected by Ukraine and its Western allies. Putin attended a meeting with veterans during a Wednesday visit to St. Petersburg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Red Army breaking the Nazi siege of the city on January 18, 1943.
The siege of the city, then called Leningrad, lasted almost 900 days and was only fully lifted in January 1944, one of the bloodiest pages of World War II.
About one million people died in Leningrad during the siege, most of them from starvation. Putin laid a wreath on Wednesday at the city’s Piskariov Memorial Cemetery, where 420,000 civilian victims of the siege and 70,000 Soviet soldiers are buried. He also placed flowers in the section where his brother, who had been killed as a child during the siege, was buried in a mass grave.
(with inputs from AP)