Putin assures that victory is certain and insists that the goal is to liberate Donbass

Russian President Vladimir Putin assured this Wednesday that he had no doubts about a victory in his offensive in Ukraine, which he said was intended to end a “war” that had been dragging on for years in the east of that country .

Victory “is guaranteed, I have no doubt,” said the Kremlin leader, who traveled to St. Petersburg, where he visited a weapons factory.

Taking the opportunity to meet with veterans, Putin reiterated that Moscow had long tried to negotiate a resolution to the conflict in Ukraine’s heavily industrialized eastern region of Donbass, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014 .

“Large-scale combat operations involving 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 purpose of our operation – to protect the people living in these areas,” the Kremlin leader assured.

Putin described eastern Ukraine as Russia’s “historic territory”, which Moscow admitted was lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. and reiterated that Russia had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement before sending troops, but had been “cheated”.

These statements by the Russian president come nearly eleven months after the launch of the military offensive in Ukraine, where Russian forces have suffered several setbacks against Ukrainian offensives in recent months.

Putin attended the meeting with veterans marking the 80th anniversary of the Red Army breaking the Nazi siege of the city on January 18, 1943.

The siege of the city then called Leningrad lasted nearly 900 days and was not fully lifted until January 1944, marking one of the bloodiest pages of World War II. About a million people died in Leningrad during the siege, most of them 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 baby during the siege, was buried in a mass grave.