A family watches a TV broadcast of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual state of the nation address in Moscow on February 21, 2023.
Yuri Kadobnov | Afp | Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday used a widely-watched speech to deny responsibility for the war in Ukraine and lash out at his adversaries.
In a more than hour-long speech, Putin claimed Russia had been attempting to allow citizens in the contested Donbas region to speak their “own language” and had been seeking a peaceful solution. He also cited the expansion of NATO and new European anti-rocket defense systems as provoking Russia, and said the objective of the west was “infinite power.”
Western nations and Ukraine have repeatedly rejected Putin’s narrative. The U.S. administration on Saturday formally concluded that Moscow had committed “crimes against humanity” during its year-long invasion of its neighbor. Political analysts say Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was the biggest mistake of his political career and has weakened Russia for years to come.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 after a falsified referendum. The invasion was widely condemned by the international community and resulted in rounds of Western sanctions against Russian officials. Last year it also annexed four Ukrainian regions (Donetsk and Luhansk which cover much of the Donbas region, and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) which Ukraine and its allies also condemned as illegal and illegitimate.
Putin on Tuesday discussed the Donbas, claiming the Kremlin saw threats increasing in the contested region ahead of the Feb .24 invasion.
“We had no doubt that by February 2022, everything was prepared for a punitive action in Donbas, where [the] Kyiv regime provided artillery and aviation and other weapons to attack Donbas in 2014. In 2015, they attempted again to directly attack Donbas, they continued shelling, terror,” he said, according to a Sky News translation.
“All of this was completely against the documents that were accepted by the United Nations Security Council. I would like to repeat: they started the war. And we used the force in order to stop it.”
Putin’s “state of the nation” address Tuesday was delivered in Moscow to lawmakers and military officials and was broadcast on state TV.
Feb. 24 will mark one year since Russia mounted a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, beginning a ground war in Europe that Putin still refers to as a “special military operation.” Intense fighting continues across the war-torn nation with the death toll reportedly in the tens of thousands.
Putin said Russia would create a highway to Crimea and enact a program of “social restoration” to territories it claims control over.
Ukrainian officials are defiant, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeatedly insisting the country will not surrender to anything but a restoration of the country’s pre-invasion borders.
U.S. President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Monday, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Biden said the trip was to “reaffirm our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” He also promised to deliver more artillery ammunition and anti-armor systems, and to announce new sanctions on Russian companies and its elites.
Biden is due to deliver another speech, pointedly following Putin’s, in Poland. He is also meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
