MINSK, June 8. /TASS/. Ukraine needs to be demilitarized because an armed-to-the-teeth neighbor poses a threat to both Russia and the countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) as a whole, including as regards the use of nuclear weapons, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said.

"The need for demilitarization is also driven by the fact that Ukraine, which has been saturated with weapons, poses a threat to Russia and to the CSTO as a whole, including in terms of the development and use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted him as saying at a meeting of the top security officials of the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) member states with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk.

Patrushev also pointed out that, "the special military operation has specific goals, upon the achievement of which depends not just the well-being, but the very lives of millions of people, and saving the population of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) from the genocide that has been carried out by Ukrainian neo-Nazis for eight years." "Our goal is to defeat the neo-Nazi bridgehead created by the efforts of the West at Russia's borders," the top security official added.

The Russian Security Council secretary pointed out that, "with the assistance of Western countries, the Ukrainian leadership used those eight years to gear up for a brutal military operation against the residents of Donbass." "In its time, Hitler’s Nazi regime dreamed of exterminating the entire Russian population, and, today, its modern-day disciples, following Hitler's precepts, are trying to carry out this ungodly mission but this time through the hands of other Slavs. Russia will not permit this to happen," he noted.