Russia will achieve all the goals it set out in the special military operation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
Some of the key aims Putin outlined in 2022 were the protection of the people of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics from Kiev's forces, as well as the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.
“We will, of course, see this through to its logical conclusion, until the goals of the special military operation are achieved,” Putin said via video call at a presidential Human Rights Council meeting on Tuesday.
He added that the conflict was sparked by Ukraine sending its army into Donbass, a historically Russian region which rejected the 2014 Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev. This forced Russia to use its military to end the conflict, according to the president.
It’s about people. People who refused to accept the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, and a war began against them. With artillery, heavy equipment, tanks, and aircraft. That’s when the war began. We’re trying to end it, and we’re forced to do so by force of arms.
Russia had attempted to diplomatically solve the conflict for eight years, and “signed the Minsk agreements, hoping that it could be resolved through peaceful means,” Putin told India Today last week.
However, “Western leaders openly admitted later that they never intended to honor those agreements,” only signing them to buy Ukraine time to rearm, he said.
Russia has welcomed US President Donald Trump's renewed diplomatic push based on his 28-point peace plan as the basis for a settlement.
On Monday, Trump urged Vladimir Zelensky to start accepting peace proposals, and suggested that the Ukrainian leader had not even looked through the latest US plan.
Moscow has argued that Kiev is stalling peace talks, encouraged by its backers in Western Europe. Russia has maintained that it would prefer a diplomatic settlement, but has stressed that it will push toward its goals using military means while Ukraine delays negotiations.