NEW YORK, March 22./TASS/. The main goal of the Russian Armed Forces in Mariupol is to clear the city of nationalist units, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday.
"Well, the strategic goal is to clear up Mariupol from nationalistic regiments who are there," Peskov explained. The nationalists "are simply not letting people out from the town" using civilians "like a shield," he stressed.
"And this is a problem because now we’re receiving lots of refugees coming from there, and they simply tell us, they are eyewitnesses," he went on to say. "Those nationalists, they were killing people who would want to leave the city. And then, the main goal is to get rid of those bad guys," Peskov stressed.
He also dubbed as a fake allegations circulated by Western media about "work camps" in Russia for refugees from Ukraine. We are now living "not only under the circumstances of a military operation, we are living in a severe informational war of fakes," Peskov stressed.
"You have to know the situation from the inside. Sometimes it is very hard to understand what is going on," the Kremlin spokesman noted.
Russian troops’ morale
Claims of low morale allegedly observed among Russian servicemen taking part in the special military operation in Ukraine should be taken with a pinch of salt, Peskov said.
"Speaking about the morale amongst our military, of course, you operate data and information coming from different media and from your intelligence. But you would probably have to doubt this information," he told CNN in an interview aired on Tuesday.
"You have to doubt it and you have to think twice whether it is true or not," the spokesman added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on February 24 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 Ukraine, stressing that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories. Putin said that the goals of the operation are demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. Subsequently, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and some other countries started imposing sanctions on Russian individuals and companies.