Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Petr Akopov
[RIA] Yesterday, while Vladimir Zelensky flew over the Atlantic to Washington, Vladimir Putin spoke in Moscow at the annual board of the Ministry of Defense. After the President's main speech, there was a report by Defense Minister Shoigu, after which Putin considered it important to say a few more words. He spoke about the reasons for the special operation, recalling that after the collapse of the USSR, for decades we had been trying to build not just good-neighbourly, but fraternal relations in the new conditions - "We gave loans, and supplied energy resources almost for free," but none of our actions reached the desired goals:
"I want to emphasize this: there is nothing to reproach us with. I say this with complete responsibility. We have always - and you know my position - considered the Ukrainian people a brotherly people. I still think so. And what is happening is, of course, a tragedy," our common tragedy!
But it is not the result of our policy - on the contrary, it is the result of the policy of third countries that have always sought to disintegrate the Russian world.
Hence the Crimean War.
To a certain extent, they have succeeded and pushed us to the line where we are. It became obvious that clashes with these forces, including in Ukraine, are inevitable. The only question was when that would happen. Of course, military actions are always associated with tragedies and loss of people. We understand this very well, we are aware of this, but, since this is inevitable, it is better today than tomorrow.
It is still very important for the President to explain what exactly led to February 24, and not only to the military, but to all citizens of the country. And not only to them, because hostilities are really a tragedy, and common for the entire Russian world, that is, Russia and Ukraine.
This cannot be understood by those who believe in nonsense about "Ukraine's sovereignty" and its "right to choose the direction of movement" or even in a separate "Ukrainian civilization," but everyone else understands that for Putin, as well as for the vast majority of our citizens, everything that happens - great pain and tragedy, and we also feel sorry for those who die from the hostile side.
Because we understand (Vladimir Putin also acknowledged this) that this is also a civil war in which brother turns against brother. But we also understand that at the same time as a civil war, it is also a war with external forces - with an enemy who, as Putin said in the same speech, has for centuries set the goal of "disintegration and weakening, disunity of our country":
"There is nothing new here. The country is too big, as they think, and poses a threat to someone, so it needs to be patched up, split up."
Putin is not talking about the Russian Federation, but about historical Russia, about what happened in 1991, because, although the USSR collapsed primarily due to the stupidity of its own ruler and the weakness of part of the elite, the collapse of the Union itself did not put an end to in historical Russia.
Everything could not be reversed, but corrected, cured dislocation, while maintaining fraternal relations between the newly independent states (as the CIS intended ) - primarily between Russia and Ukraine. These friendly ties would inevitably lead to a new reintegration, at least in the form of the Eurasian Union , and as a maximum - in the form that the Union State of Russia and Belarus now has.
The leadership of Russia has always been set up for this, and from the second half of the 90s (that is, even before Putin), Boris Yeltsin , the destroyer of the USSR, proceeded from this.
But such a course of events did not suit the West at all - and it was precisely its conscious work to widen and deepen the gap, the stake on preventing reintegration (together, of course, with the mood of part of the elites of the post-Soviet republics) that ultimately worked. And it led to the current tragedy, which Vladimir Putin acknowledged on Wednesday.
Recognition of the success of the West (primarily the Anglo-Saxons) in disintegrating the Russian world and provoking hostilities does not mean our capitulation - Putin is talking about objective reality. Yes, our policy of peacefully preserving the unity of the Russian world did not work, we could not outplay a strong and intelligent opponent. Of course, there were also internal reasons for this - the weakness of our politics and the elite, but still we should not forget the state in which Putin got Russia and what our "elite" was like at the beginning of 2000.
If Putin could only deal with Ukraine from the very beginning, there would have been no Maidan victory in 2014, but for the first two terms he was engaged in pulling Russia out of the pit and reformatting the comprador elite that emerged in the 90s. And when, in the early 1910s, he got down to business building the Eurasian Union - with an eye to including Ukraine in it - it was already too late: a large (and most active) part of the Ukrainian elite was tied to the West.
Kiev 's turn away from integration with the European Union led to the fact that in February 2014 the West tried to take Ukraine away from Russia forever with one blow, which led to the Crimea and subsequent events in the Donbass . Russia made it clear that it would not allow the Russian world to be torn apart, and for several years hoped that it would be possible to convince the West of the futility of attempts to atlantize Ukraine. And only after making sure that the Anglo-Saxons were simply playing for time and were not going to retreat or agree on Nezalezhnaya (growing anti-Russia out of it), Putin decided to take military action.
Yes, they became a tragedy for the entire Russian world (of which even the most Ukrainian Ukrainians are a part), and the West, at first glance, even such a development of events is beneficial: if it is not possible to keep Ukraine behind, then at least burn it in the fire of a proxy war with Russia, which should eventually weaken and withdraw into itself. But can the West consider itself a winner even at this stage, if its strategy of dividing Russia and Ukraine has worked, provoking a fratricidal war, forcing Russia into military action?
No, he can not. Because, despite all the tragedy of the “new civil”, Russia nevertheless decided to snatch weapons made from its own part, Ukraine, from enemy hands, refused to postpone until later the solution of the vitally important problem for it of the existence of anti-Russia on Russian lands. Russia accepted the challenge? Yes, but we, in fact, were not left with a choice, because, having abandoned Ukraine-Little Russia, Russia would cease to be Russia.
Those Atlanticists who thought otherwise, believing that we have a choice (“reconcile with the loss of Ukraine, admit your weakness and our strength”), and now believe in the possibility of victory over Russia, are very much mistaken. Yes, they managed to win the first stage of the confrontation (play off two parts of the whole), but Russia has already entered the "warpath" - it cannot be stopped or defeated.
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