MOSCOW, December 19. /TASS/. The decision to launch the special military operation in Ukraine should have been made earlier than 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"Looking back, knowing what we know now, I think the decision we made in early 2022 should have been made sooner," he said.
"And secondly, in hindsight, we should have begun preparing for the special military operation even sooner still," he added.
He recalled that the 2014 events in Crimea had been spontaneous. "And the 2022 developments began without special preparations. Why did we begin them? Because we could not sit around and watch the situation deteriorate further," he said.
The Russian president recalled that the Kiev authorities said straight away that they would not implement the Minsk agreements and hinted at potentially having "weapons of mass destruction." It became clear for Russia that it had been deceived about the Minsk agreements, he noted.
"The war in Donbass, the carnage continued for eight years. Nothing was happening, the Minsk agreements were rejected. Moreover, we saw that they had begun building military infrastructure in these territories, concurrently seeking to uproot everything linked with Russia," Putin went on to say.
Russia, in his words, could not tolerate this any longer. "We were forced to do this. If we knew beforehand what would happen, we should have seriously prepared. I would have taken this into account," Putin said.