Russia should have launched its military campaign against Kiev earlier, after realizing that neither Ukraine nor its Western backers were committed to a peaceful settlement of the Donbass crisis, President Vladimir Putin has said.
In an interview with Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin on Sunday, Putin acknowledged that while it is difficult to give the ideal date for the special military operation in hindsight, Russians “should have gotten our bearings earlier and understood that our opponents are not going to implement the Minsk agreements, that they are simply leading us by the nose, misleading us.”
A crime, Putin continued, can result from either action or inaction. “Our inaction would have been a crime against the interests of Russia and those of her people,” the president stressed.
The now-defunct Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014 and brokered by Germany and France, were intended to give the Donetsk and Lugansk regions a special status within the Ukrainian state. However, former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
After the conflict escalated in 2022, the same sentiment was echoed by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande.
The Western leaders were doing their best to prepare Kiev for a further fight with Russia, Putin stressed. “And if they gave them the opportunity to prepare for future military actions, it means they were counting on them. With this in mind, we should have acted more decisively and swiftly, should have prepared for this and chosen the right moment to start [the campaign], without waiting for the moment when it was no longer possible to sit on our hands,” he added.
Russia has said that it sent troops to Ukraine to protect the people of Donbass from recurring Ukrainian strikes and cited Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, while Ukraine has insisted that the attack was completely unprovoked. Moscow has also consistently opposed Kiev’s aspirations to join NATO, viewing the expansion of the US-led bloc as an existential threat.
In the autumn of 2022, the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions voted overwhelmingly to join Russia in public referendums.
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