MOSCOW, December 23. /TASS/. Russia could not turn down the Crimean people’s pursuit of protection after a deadly coup in Ukraine in 2014, President Vladimir Putin said at his annual press conference on Thursday.
Putin pointed out that Russia had cooperated with all of Ukraine’s governments regardless of their foreign policy priorities. According to him, tensions started mounting in 2014. "Before that, we were okay with it, we had coped with the fact that the Soviet Union had collapsed and some of Russia’s historic territories whose population had ties with historic Russia had found themselves outside Russia, first and foremost, in Ukraine, and we even facilitated the establishment of those states," Putin specified.
The president recalled Moscow’s relations with Kiev under Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko who, "like Ukraine’s current authorities, [they] touted their completely pro-Western policy line." "We had disputes over gas issues, we even had conflicts but eventually we came to an agreement. "We worked with them and were ready to continue that way, it did not occur to us to take any action regarding Crimea," Putin said.
But in 2014, "a deadly coup" took place in Ukraine, he went on to say, adding: "People were being killed and burned alive." "How could we turn away Sevastopol and Crimea, the people who live there, and refuse to take them under our wing and provide protection to them? That’s impossible. We were put in a situation where we could not act otherwise," the president stressed. "Similarly, could we have shown a lack of will amid the developments in the southeast, in Donbass, which from the very beginning, even when the Soviet Union was formed, <...> did not consider itself to be anything but part of Russia? However, back then, Lenin and his team forcefully pushed it there," Putin added. "First, they decided to include the region in Russia but moved to review the matter. And they did revise it, creating a country that had never existed, adding a historic territory without asking its people where and how they wanted to live." According to the Russian leader, these are the roots of "the crisis that is unfolding now."
Putin stressed that Kiev had twice attempted to use force to resolve the Donbass issue. "We tried to talk them out of it. I personally tried to discourage [former Ukrainian President Pyotr] Poroshenko," he said. However, Kiev launched a military operation, which led "to troops being surrounded and suffering losses, and to the Minsk Agreements," the president noted. He emphasized that the Minsk deal remained "the only possible option" for resolving the crisis, but Kiev was reluctant to implement the agreement.