Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that he had no doubts about a victory in his offensive in Ukraine, which he said was aimed at ending a “war” that has been dragging on for years in the east of that country.
Victory “is assured, I have no doubts,” said the Kremlin leader, who traveled to St. Petersburg, where he visited an arms factory.
Using the occasion for a meeting with veterans, Putin reasserted that Moscow had long sought to negotiate a solution to the conflict in Ukraine’s highly industrialized eastern region of Donbass, where Russian-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since 2014.
“Large-scale combat operations with heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and aircraft have not stopped in Donbass since 2014,” Putin said.
“Everything we are doing today, as part of the special military operation, is an attempt to stop this war. This is the meaning of our operation: to protect the people who live in these territories,” said the Kremlin leader.
Putin described eastern Ukraine as Russia’s “historical territory”, the loss of which Moscow admitted after the 1991 Soviet collapse, and again insisted that Russia had tried to broker a peaceful deal before sending troops, but “was misled”.
These remarks by the Russian president come almost eleven months after the launch of the military offensive in Ukraine, where Russian forces have suffered several setbacks in recent months in the face of Ukrainian offensives.
Putin was at the meeting with the veterans to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Red Army breaking the Nazi siege of the city on January 18, 1943.
The siege of the city that was then called Leningrad lasted almost 900 days and was only fully lifted in January 1944, marking one of the bloodiest pages of World War II. About a million people died in Leningrad during the siege, mostly from starvation.
Putin laid a wreath at the Piskaryov cemetery, where 420,000 civilian victims of the siege and 70,000 Soviet soldiers were buried, and another at a section where his brother, who died as a child during the siege, was buried in a mass grave.
Source: TSF
