MOSCOW, June 3. /TASS/. Russia’s actions in Ukraine are a special operation, not a war, because the targets of its troops are limited to military facilities and objects, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview to Qatar’s Al Jazeera television.
"It is indeed a special military operation. Events there uphold according to a certain scenario. The president said we have two goals that must be achieved. The first is to defend residents of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, many of whom are Russian citizens, and there is about one million of them. The second one is to destroy the militarist mechanism and de-Nazify those areas, or, in other words, to make sure that there are no neo-Nazis promoting anti-Russian, Russophobic agenda there," he said. "That is why targets of this operation are limited."
"The operation involves mostly the use of high-precision weapons. Military facilities are being destroyed," he said. "The Russian troops are trying to minimize the threat to civilian facilities. We are trying to act in a way that would only affect the armed forces of Ukraine. That is why our troops’ actions were called a special military operation," Medvedev added.
In his words, the United States and its NATO allies declared "a so-called proxy war on Russia, which implies supplying enormous amounts of weaponry to Ukraine."
"They are trying to encourage militaristic moods, the militarist hysteria, to make Ukraine fight with Russia ‘until the last remaining Ukrainian,’ so to say. For obvious reasons, neither the United States nor Europe sustain any losses in this situation," he said.
"Six million people have already left Ukraine, and those countries bear a noticeable share of responsibility for what had happened," Medvedev added.