Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Western countries of starting the conflict in Ukraine on Tuesday. “They started the war and we used our strength to stop it,” said the head of the Kremlin during his speech on the state of the nation before the two chambers (Duma and senate) of the Russian Parliament (the Federal Assembly). The West wants to stir up a global war to destroy Russia, Putin argued.
In the midst of the confrontation with the West, the Russian president announced in his speech that Russia is suspending its participation in START III or New START, the last nuclear disarmament treaty still in force between Russia and the United States.
According to Russia’s official discourse, the war with Ukraine began in 2014 in the Ukrainian Donbass, which includes the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. The “special military operation”, as Moscow calls it, is a Russian intervention to defend the population of that region from “genocide” orchestrated by the “Kyiv regime”.
Western countries, although they promised to solve the problems of the residents of Donbass, “turned a blind eye,” Putin said.
“The promise of the Western rulers to seek peace in the Donbass turned out to be a forgery, a cruel lie. They were simply passing up time,” he said. According to the president, they ignored “the political assassinations and the repression of the Kyiv regime.”
Putin assured that Russia did everything possible to solve the Donbass problem by peaceful means and was negotiating. “But behind our backs they were setting up a very different scenario,” he added.
Although it should be an annual event, enshrined in the Russian Constitution, Putin did not address the Federal Assembly in 2022. The last time he did so was in April 2021. The session was adjourned several times last year due to his ” busy schedule,” argued his spokesman, Dimitri Peskov.
It was finally set on February 21, 2023, three days before the 24th marks one year since the Russian leader sent the Army to Ukraine. Deputies, senators and other representatives of the political and military elite gathered for the occasion at the Gostini Dvor exhibition center near Moscow’s Red Square.
Putin’s annual address came a day after US President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv, where he condemned Moscow’s “brutal” assault on the neighboring country’s sovereignty.
The words of the Russian leader coincide almost in time with others from Biden. Shortly after his conclusion, the American president is scheduled to deliver a speech focused on the conflict in Ukraine during his visit to Poland.
Putin devoted almost his entire speech to talking about the conflict with Ukraine and its consequences, and he focused it above all on blaming the West, not only for the outbreak of hostilities, but also for trying to destroy Russia by causing it a “strategic defeat” in Ukraine. “They want to end it (Russia) once and for all,” Putin said in a speech regularly accompanied by applause from the audience.
And he assured that the West is carrying out a war against Russia also in the information and economic fields, with sanctions. But they won’t, he assured.
According to the head of the Kremlin, Western countries, “led by the United States”, “are trying to bring the local conflict (in Ukraine) to a global confrontation”.
“We are not fighting against the Ukrainian people,” he said, “but against the Kyiv regime and its Western guardians.” For Putin, the Ukrainian people are “hostage” to both, especially Westerners, “who have occupied this country politically, militarily and economically.” And he added that “the Kyiv regime serves not its national interests, but the interests of third countries.”
Putin also spoke about the economic situation in Russia, which in 2022 has become the most sanctioned country in the world. With these sanctions, the West tries to make the Russians “suffer”, but on the economic front, according to him, they have not succeeded. “They want to make people suffer, but their calculations have not materialized. The Russian economy and its management turned out to be much stronger than they thought,” he told Russian lawmakers.
Although he described the situation as “difficult”, he asserted that Russia will achieve its objectives in Ukraine “step by step”. “In order to ensure the security of our country, in order to eliminate the threat posed by the neo-Nazi regime that emerged in Ukraine after the 2014 coup, it was decided to carry out a special military operation. Step by step, carefully and consistently, we will achieve the tasks we are facing.” , he opined from a lectern, under the coat of arms of Russia and flanked by eight tricolor flags.
According to the Russian president, the majority of his fellow citizens support the “special military operation” in Ukraine, and he thanked them for “their courage and resolution.”
This February 21 marks exactly one year from the moment Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of the self-proclaimed Donetsk (PRD) and Luhansk (RPL) People’s Republics.
On February 21, 2022, the Russian president called a meeting of the Security Council and asked its members to pronounce on this possible decision. In the evening he announced on television the decision to recognize these pro-Russian entities in eastern Ukraine.
It was then that he declared that the Soviet Ukraine arose “as a result of Bolshevik policy” and that it was created by Lenin.
In the Kremlin they have planned to celebrate this February 22 a great rally-concert. According to the Russian media, the Russian president is supposed to participate in it, in what is considered a kind of “continuation” of Tuesday’s message to the Federal Assembly, a source told the RBK newspaper.
The last time a rally-concert was held with Putin’s participation was on March 18, 2022, also in Luzhniki. That day was the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea by Russia, considered illegal by Ukraine and widely condemned by the Western community.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, more than 200,000 people gathered at the stadium that day.