BELGRADE, March 11. /TASS/. The conflict between the West and Russia has been lasting for centuries and the West has been looking upon Ukraine in recent years as a stronghold for attacking Russia, Slavenko Terzic, historian and former Serbian Ambassador to Moscow, said on Friday.

"As for the conflict between Russia and the West, it has been lasting for centuries. To put it in a nutshell, I think it is about the West’s, NATO’s and the United States’ crusade against Russia," he said in an interview with the TV Vesti channel. "Russia’s operation is part of the country’s activities to defend itself from actions threatening its elementary security. <…> The thing is that the West has been looking upon Ukraine as a stronghold for an attack on Russia. Some 13,000 people have been killed in Donbass. No one knows but various nationalist battalions, foreign mercenaries committed horrifying atrocities there, with American, Polish, British instructors being sent there. As a matter of fact, it was a quiet war against the DPR and LPR (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics - TASS), and against Russia."

According to Terzic, the Ukrainian nation was created at the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th centuries by Austria-Hungary’s and Germany’s special services. He cited Austrian generals on this topic. He recalled about Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s Vienna-financed activities, who developed the ideology of the Ukrainian nation on the basis of Russophobia. The Serbian diplomat noted that the Ukrainian language was created on the basis of local dialects, as well as on the Polish and German languages. The Bolsheviks and their leader Vladimir Lenin completed the process, he added.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became a center of "blatant Rossophobia," he noted. He also spoke about the conflict in Donbass and touched upon the topic of biolaboratories in Ukraine. The West, in his words, was preparing Ukraine for a war with Russia. "The Ukrainian people is sustaining big losses and only the United States and Europe are benefiting from this situation," he said, adding that in the current conditions the European Uion "has lost its independence to become a US tool against Russia."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address 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 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, its goals were denazification and demilitarization of that country.

Following this step, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and several other countries announced sanctions against Russian individuals and legal entities.