MOSCOW, April 7. /TASS/. Washington sends militants to Ukraine in order to organize a terrorist underground movement in the country, according to an article by Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin published in the National Defense (Natsionalnaya Oborona) magazine.
"[Washington] is using the most underhanded methods, up to dispatching armed militants to Ukrainian territory who are instructed to organize and maintain the so-called partisan but actually terrorist underground in the country," he pointed out.
According to the intelligence chief, currently the US sees its main task in "prolonging the conflict as much as possible, making it as costly as possible both for Moscow and Kiev while simultaneously not letting the escalation spread further to the West." That said, "the US, much like the majority of the rest of NATO members, is clearly not ready to go beyond providing moral and financial support to the Kiev junta and openly enter direct armed confrontations on its [Ukraine’s] side," he asserted.
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation in order to protect people "who have been suffering from abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years." The Russian leader stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories.