Putin claims Russia invaded Ukraine to end ‘war’ that began in 2014 – National | 24CA News

Russian President Vladimir Putin stated Wednesday that Moscow’s motion in Ukraine was meant to cease a “war” that has raged in jap Ukraine for a few years.

Speaking at a gathering with veterans, Putin stated that Moscow had lengthy sought to barter a settlement to the battle in Ukraine’s jap industrial heartland of Donbas, the place Russia-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014.

“Large-scale combat operations involving heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and aircraft haven’t stopped in Donbas since 2014,” Putin stated. “All that we are doing today as part of the special military operation is an attempt to stop this war. This is the meaning of our operation – protecting people who live on those territories.”

On Wednesday, Putin once more insisted that Russia had tried to barter a peaceable settlement earlier than sending in troops, however “we were just duped and cheated.”

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He described Ukraine’s east as Russia’s “historic territories,” including that Moscow conceded their loss after the 1991 Soviet collapse however needed to act to guard Russian audio system there.

Putin has defined his choice to ship troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 by the necessity to shield Russian audio system and conduct “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine to forestall it from posing a menace to Russia – claims rejected by Ukraine and its Western allies as a canopy for an unprovoked act of aggression.

Putin attended the assembly with veterans throughout Wednesday’s go to to St. Petersburg to mark the eightieth anniversary of the Red Army breaking the Nazi siege of the town on Jan. 18, 1943.

The siege of the town that was then known as Leningrad lasted practically 900 days and was solely totally lifted in January 1944, marking one of many bloodiest pages of the Second World War. About a million individuals died in Leningrad in the course of the siege, most of them from hunger.

Putin on Wednesday laid a wreath on the metropolis’s Piskaryov memorial cemetery the place 420,000 civilian victims of the siege and 70,000 Soviet troopers have been buried. He additionally put flowers in a piece the place his brother, who died as a toddler in the course of the siege, was buried in a mass grave.

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