MOSCOW, March 2. /TASS/. The countries that ignored Russia’s vital interests are fully to blame for the current tensions, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told the Rossiya-24 TV channel on Wednesday.

"We have gone a long way trying to convince them. The [Russian] president talked about it a lot. I think that the countries that shape the general policy vector lost the chance. They are fully to blame for it," he pointed out.

"Let’s have a look at what happened after 2014. We made every possible effort to launch the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. As many as 14,000 people were killed in Donetsk and Lugansk in the past eight years. However, our partners remained completely indifferent to our appeals," Grushko added.

At the same time, in his words, another issue is that the statements that NATO made in the past years did not mention the Minsk accords in relation to Ukraine. "Had the alliance recognized the Minsk Agreements, it would have had to recognize that it was about a domestic conflict in Ukraine and the question would have arisen who NATO was assisting? What regime was it pumping with weapons and instructors, whose forces was it training? Was it being done to let them get away with shelling attacks aimed at killing their own people?" he mused. The second question is what was the reason for a military buildup on the eastern flank if it was about a domestic conflict, Grushko added. "This is how NATO arrived at this terrible security crisis in Europe that we are all going through, unfortunately," the senior diplomat concluded.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation based on a request from the heads of the Donbass republics. The Russian leader stressed that Moscow had no plans to occupy Ukrainian territories and the goal was to demilitarize and denazify the country. Russia’s Defense Ministry reported later that the Russian Armed Forces were not delivering strikes against Ukrainian cities. The ministry emphasized that the Ukrainian military infrastructure was being destroyed by precision weapons and there was no threat to civilians.