On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would achieve its objectives in the Ukrainian campaign and stated that Moscow had no choice but to launch a military operation to protect Russia, according to Reuters.
Putin spoke at an awards ceremony at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Far East Russia, where he said that the clash with Ukraine’s anti-Russian forces had been inevitable.
“Its goals are absolutely clear and noble,” Putin said of the Russian military campaign.
President Putin stated that Moscow’s primary objective in Ukraine was to save the people of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, an area where Russian-supported separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
“The main goal is to help the people of Donbas, whose independence we recognized. We were forced to do so because the Kyiv authorities, pressed by the West, refused to comply with the Minsk agreements aimed at a peaceful solution of the Donbas-related problems,” said Putin.
The Minsk agreements initiated multiple deals, in which Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists agreed to a ceasefire in September 2014.
The deal included prisoner exchanges, humanitarian aid deliveries, and heavy weapons withdrawal. The agreement quickly disintegrated, with violations on both sides.
“On the one hand, we are helping and saving people, and on the other, we are simply taking measures to ensure the security of Russia itself,” Putin continued. “It’s clear that we didn’t have a choice. It was the right decision.”
President Putin also commented on the sanctions imposed on Russia after his troops invaded Ukraine on February 24.
“That Blitzkrieg on which our foes were counting did not work,” he stated.
Russia’s economy is currently on track to contract by more than 10% in 2022, the biggest drop in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) since the years following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
An economic contraction is a decline in national output as measured by GDP, which includes a decline in real personal income, retail sales, and industrial production.
Even so, Russia has no intentions of turning back now.
“We will not stop military operations in Ukraine until they (Russian forces) succeed,” Putin said.
