Russian President Vladimir Putin said his plans regarding the war in Ukraine would not change in an annual address to the nation Thursday. Pool Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko/EPA-EFE
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that his plan for the war in Ukraine was unchanged and that the conflict would end only after Moscow’s aims were realized.
Speaking in an annual address to the Russian public, his first major news conference since Russia’s forces full-scale invasion almost two years ago, Putin said there would be peace when his Ukraine objectives of “denazification, demilitarization and its neutral status,” were achieved. Advertisement
“These objectives do not change,” he said.
“If they don’t want to come to an agreement, then we are forced to take other measures, including military ones. Or we will agree on certain terms,” he said at the carefully stage-managed event which was combined with a public phone-in.
Putin claimed the sides reached an agreement in talks in Istanbul in March 2022, which was then scrapped — Kyiv disputes there was ever any deal — and re-iterated that there were only two possible outcomes to the conflict: come to deal, or resolve it by force.
“This is what we will strive for,” Putin said.
He said Russia’s economy was performing strongly despite the demands being made on it by his so-called “special military operation,” claiming Russian forces held front-line superiority all across the front line. Advertisement
However, he did reveal that a total of 617,000 troops were mobilized in Ukraine and that 300,000 men were drafted last year in addition to 486,000 “contract” soldiers — but did not talk about casualties, estimated by the United States at 315,000.
Warning that Russian sovereignty was inviolate, Putin said NATO was responsible for the war and the widening rift between his country and the Western world by threatening Russia’s territorial integrity.
“The unbridled desire to creep towards our borders, taking Ukraine into NATO, all this led to this tragedy. Plus the bloody events in Donbas for eight years — all this led to the tragedy that we are now experiencing. They forced us into these actions,” he said.
“What the United States conceived and organized, Europe stands and silently watches, or plays and sings along with them there. Well how can we build relations with them?” Putin opined.
He said the conditions for restoring “fully fledged” ties would only come with internal U.S. change resulting in it “respecting other people and other countries.”
