HANOI, October 29. /TASS/. Ukraine and its Western partners would have made Donbass look like Gaza if Russia had not started a special military operation to save people in southeastern Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik said.
He made the statement while presenting a photo exhibition titled "The Brutal Truth about the Crimes of the Kiev Regime" at the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Hanoi.
"You can observe what has been happening in the Gaza Strip in Palestine for a year now. This is exactly the fate Kiev and its Western partners were preparing for Donbass. If Russia had not started a special military operation to save the residents of southeastern Ukraine, if Russia had not stood up for Donbass, then Donbass would now look exactly like the Gaza Strip under Israeli shelling," Miroshnik told the audience, which included leaders of the Union of Vietnam Friendship Societies, representatives of diplomatic missions and military attaches from Cuba, Myanmar, the DPRK and Mongolia.
The diplomat mentioned that by February 2022, Ukraine has assembled a more than 150,000-strong military force along the engagement line in Donbass, which outnumbered the Donbass militia in personnel and equipment by at least five times.
"Just a week before Russia started the special military operation, Ukraine increased the number of shelling attacks on the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics by 15 times. This was nothing else but an artillery preparation before the start of a Ukrainian infantry operation, for which everything was ready," he said.
The diplomat also rejected Western statements that Russia has never offered terms for resolving the conflict peacefully.
"Western politicians allow themselves to spread another myth that has no basis in reality, which is that Russia allegedly does not want to hold peace talks. Russia has never rejected the option of resolving the conflict through diplomacy. Russia has participated in at least six negotiation formats and hundreds of rounds of talks aimed at a bloodless settlement of the conflict in Donbass," he said.
According to the diplomat, the expert community in Vietnam has a deep understanding of the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis and what is happening now in Donbass.
"In Vietnam, people demonstrate a very high level of immersion in these problems, and they ask very meaningful, very precise questions that relate to the origin, the genesis of the crisis. They clearly formulate questions about the role and participation of the Western so-called strategic partners of Ukraine in unleashing the conflict and their own inhibiting role with respect to the chances of ending it," he said.