NEW YORK, January 11. /TASS/. For years, the United States had been turning Ukraine into a base for strikes on Russia, and Moscow had no other choice but to respond, said Col. (ret.) Douglas Macgregor, who was the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Donald Trump administration.

Macgregor said in a video, posted on his YouTube channel, that the US media has "systematically misinformed" the American public about events in eastern Europe and portrayed Russia’s special operation as an "unprovoked attack" on Ukraine.

"There's a lot of nonsense," he said. "We've been working for years building up this enormous 600,000 man standing army with one purpose in mind to attack Russia and turn Eastern Ukraine into a platform for attacks on everything in Russia, including the use of theater ballistic missiles."

"The Russians has finally felt compelled to intervene and they have," Macgregor added.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that, in response to a request from the Donbass republics, he made a decision to carry out a special military operation in Ukraine. He underscored that Moscow does not plan to occupy Ukrainian territories, instead planning to demilitarize and denazify the country. In response, the West started introducing sweeping sanctions against Russia and shipping weapons and military vehicles to Kiev already worth tens of billions of dollars at this point.