MOSCOW, June 23. /TASS/. The Kiev regime, prompted by its Western masters, planned to launch a punitive operation in Donbass in February or March 2022, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin, who is also chairman of the Russian Historical Society, said on Friday.

"We had received enough information that a decision has been made in Kiev and serious forces had been concentrated around Donbass to finally strangle it. After the start of the special military operation, the actions of our military have discovered, so to speak, documents indicating that in fact Kiev, with the consent or even at the instigation of its Western masters, had planned to launch an essentially punitive operation at the end of February or the beginning of March (2022 - TASS), which would result in casualties among the residents of Donbass," he pointed out at a TASS conference.

In addition, Naryshkin recalled the situation with the Minsk agreements and with the proposals of the Russian side on security guarantees. "Despite the concluded, signed Minsk agreements, there were no results of these agreements, because neither the guarantors of the Minsk agreements on the part of the Kiev regime, represented by France and Germany, nor the Kiev regime during those eight years fulfilled the agreements. And then, as you know, all these figures said that the Minsk agreements were needed in order to stall for time so that Ukraine could build up its military muscle," he added, "Besides, the events of late 2021 showed that the Western so-called former partners by no means agree to Russia's proposals on security guarantees, on the creation of a real security regime on the European continent."

"All these were the reasons for [launching] the special military operation," Naryshkin summarized.