Western countries, including the United States and Britain, have already supplied Ukraine with heavy weapons, including US-made HIMARS rocket launchers and M777 howitzers.
Putin also announced that Moscow would temporarily withdraw from the last remaining nuclear deal between Russia and the United States, the New START Treaty. He stated that the agreement was originally drawn up under completely different circumstances and that the United States is now making ultimatums to Russia, while NATO itself has essentially submitted an application to become part of the agreement. Members of the bloc are now demanding inspections of Russia’s strategic facilities, Putin said, noting that Moscow’s requests to inspect Western nuclear facilities under the treaty are being systematically denied.
In the same speech, Putin accused the West of playing with stacked decks while simulating diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbass. He pointed out that Western countries had admitted that the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements were just a “diplomatic spectacle, a bluff”. Putin also accused the West of using this “despicable method of deception” during campaigns in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel has reiterated that the Minsk agreements signed in 2014-2015 to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine were meant to give Kiev time to strengthen its military. He said in an interview with the Italian newspaper Sette that the Ukraine of that time in 2014-15 was not the same as it is now, and doubted that NATO could have helped Ukraine as much as it can today. Russia has cited Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements as one of the reasons for launching Moscow’s military operation in February 2022.
Senator Konstantin KosachevThe deputy speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament has previously said that thousands of lives have been lost in eastern Ukraine since 2014 because the West has treated the Minsk agreements as scrap paper. Kosachev was reacting to former French President Francois Hollande’s admission that the Minsk agreements were a ploy to buy time for Kiev to strengthen its military. The senator claimed that the only author of the Minsk Agreements that tried to be a genuine guarantor was Russia and that the West’s approach to Ukraine contradicts so-called European values.
Putin’s comments came nearly a year after Moscow launched a military operation in Ukraine, citing the need to protect the people of Donbass and Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements. According to Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of the Russian Investigative Committee, the conflict has resulted in around 5,000 deaths in Donbass since 2014, and nearly 9,000 wounded.
HT
Source: The Nordic Page