According to the Russian leader, Western politicians have been trying to gain full control of Ukraine for many decades.
“They financed nationalist and anti-Russian organisations there and systematically propagated the idea that Russia is Ukraine’s eternal enemy and the main threat to its existence,” Putin is quoted as saying on the Kremlin’s official website.
The Head of State added that the West, in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions, has turned Ukraine into a bargaining chip.
Putin recalled how in 2014 the Americans and their satellites organised an armed coup in Ukraine, the main participants of which were radical neo-Nazi groups. It was they who subsequently began to determine the entire course of the state in kyiv.
“For many years, millions of civilians in Donbass were subjected to genocide, bombings and blockades by the Kiev regime. In Ukraine, hatred of everything Russian became the official ideology. More and more restrictions were introduced on the Russian language and it was subjected to canonical Orthodoxy, up to persecution and now outright bans,” the president concluded.
