Russian President Vladimir Putin has crossed another point of no return. A few minutes before six in the morning Moscow time, an hour earlier in Ukraine, the Russian leader announced a “special military operation” in Donbas. Putin, who has agitated for months the argument that the Kiev regime is a Nazi regime that discriminates against Russian-speakers and that the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugasnsk regions are suffering “genocide”, has affirmed that the military aggression is to “defend and protect” citizens. “We will strive to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. And also bring to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of Russia,” Putin said, sternly in a video message flanked by two Russian flags. The Russian leader has said the move seeks to demilitarize but not occupy the country.
On Monday, after a fiery speech in which he questioned the sovereignty of Ukraine, which he considers a fictitious country, the result of historical and diplomatic seams, Putin signed the recognition of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which, fed by the Kremlin, They have been fighting with the Ukrainian Army for eight years in a war that has already claimed 14,000 lives. Immediately afterwards, as the decree stated, he ordered the sending of troops to the two secessionist territories. It is not yet clear how far Putin will advance in Donbas. The self-proclaimed “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk control a third of the region they claim. Putin has endorsed it. In the area of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, an hour’s drive from the front line, several explosions were heard. Also a little further in, in Dnipro, according to witnesses. And in Kharkov, 30 kilometers from the Russian border. In addition, Reuters reported that explosions were also heard in Kiev, the capital, far from the front line.
The Russian leader said he made the decision after receiving a request for help from the leaders of Russia-backed breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine.
Hours earlier, in an emotional speech to the nation, with a restrained but dramatic gesture, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, seemed to foreshadow that another military aggression by Russia would take place tonight, which in 2014 invaded Crimea and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. with a referendum not recognized by the international community. Kiev is ready to negotiate with Moscow on any channel and at any time, he has said in a speech in Ukrainian and Russian released on his Telegram channel.
“Today I started a phone call with the Russian president. The result was silence, although silence should be in the Donbas,” Zelensky said, before addressing the Russians directly: “We are separated by more than 2,000 kilometers of mutual borders, along which there are 200,000 of its soldiers and 1,000 armored vehicles. Their leadership has approved their passage into the territory of another country. This step could become the beginning of a great war”, he stressed. “We don’t need war, not hot, not cold, not hybrid. But if the troops attack us and someone tries to take away our country, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, then we will defend ourselves. And when they attack us they will see our faces, not our backs.”
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The night has been unsettling and tense in Donbas and throughout Ukraine. The government, which despite alarms from the United States and NATO, has been skeptical for weeks about a possible invasion, changed its course on Wednesday. It closed the airports of Kharkov, Zaporiya and Dnipro, in the East of Ukraine. Before, he declared a state of emergency and decreed the call for up to 36,000 reservists.
In his speech broadcast on state television channels while the UN Security Council was taking place on the occasion of the Russian threat, the head of the Kremlin, which since the end of November has concentrated tens of thousands of soldiers around the borders of Ukraine – up to 190,000, according to the latest information from the United States – has assured that clashes between Ukrainian and Russian forces are “inevitable” and “only a matter of time”. Putin has claimed that NATO’s further expansion and its use of Ukraine’s territory are “unacceptable.”
In addition, the Russian president called on the Ukrainian military to lay down their arms and threatened with a forceful response to those countries that decide to intervene in the situation from abroad. “I urge you to lay down your arms immediately and go home. All servicemen of the Ukrainian army who meet this requirement will be able to freely leave the combat zone and return to their families,” he stated.
“The policy of the Empire of Lies, which I spoke about at the beginning of my speech, is based, first of all, on direct brute force. In such cases we say: there is power, no mind is needed. And we all know that true power lies in justice and truth, which are on our side,” Putin said. “And if this is so, then it is difficult not to agree that strength and the willingness to fight are the basis of independence and sovereignty, they are the necessary foundation on which only one can build their future,” he asserted. .
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