During a Tuesday press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Minsk agreement no longer exists, and that Ukraine must demilitarize. He added that they should no longer seek NATO membership.
“This would mean that the Western leaders would not lose face,” Putin said, speaking through an interpreter.
Putin then spoke again of concerns that Ukraine could develop nuclear weaponry, and that “demilitarization” was the “only objective controlling factor that we could observe and have a proper reaction to.”
“Even the appearance of tactical nuclear weaponry in Ukraine, for us this means a strategic threat,” Putin added.
This follows a Monday press conference, during which Putin argued that sovereignty of Ukraine as a state was a fiction.
“So, I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia,” Putin said according to a Kremlin translation. “This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia – by separating, severing what is historically Russian land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they thought.”
“Then, both before and after the Great Patriotic War, Stalin incorporated in the USSR and transferred to Ukraine some lands that previously belonged to Poland, Romania and Hungary,” Putin continued. “In the process, he gave Poland part of what was traditionally German land as compensation, and in 1954, Khrushchev took Crimea away from Russia for some reason and also gave it to Ukraine. In effect, this is how the territory of modern Ukraine was formed.”
“Actually, as I have already said, Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine,’” Putin said. “He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents, including Lenin’s harsh instructions regarding Donbass, which was actually shoved into Ukraine. And today the ‘grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization.”
After discussing post-Soviet budgetary issues, Putin then claimed that Ukrainian authorities “began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us, trying to distort the mentality and historical memory of millions of people, of entire generations living in Ukraine.”
“It is not surprising that Ukrainian society was faced with the rise of far-right nationalism, which rapidly developed into aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism,” Putin said. “This resulted in the participation of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis in the terrorist groups in the North Caucasus and the increasingly loud territorial claims to Russia.”
“A stable statehood has never developed in Ukraine; its electoral and other political procedures just serve as a cover, a screen for the redistribution of power and property between various oligarchic clans,” Putin added.
Story cited here.
