On Saturday, Russian officials claimed that Ukraine had indeed been demilitarized – in line with the goals of Moscow’s invasion of the eastern European country – despite clear and significant evidence to the contrary.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began almost 16 months ago in February 2022 and lasted far longer than the Kremlin leadership reportedly expected. At the start of the conflict, Russia advanced a handful of justifications that experts were quick to dismiss as dubious, including claims that it wanted to “denazify” the Ukrainian government and that Russian-speakers were discriminated against in eastern Ukraine.
Another assertion made by Russia over the course of the invasion concerns the need to demilitarize Ukraine. On Saturday, Russia’s state-run Tass news agency reported claims by Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov that Ukraine had been effectively demilitarized. The claim struck a strange nerve considering that, thanks to international aid, Ukraine arguably has more military equipment than ever before. In his attempted argument, Peskov said the goal was nevertheless achieved because Ukraine is now using less of its own hardware.
“Indeed, at the beginning of the war, Ukraine was heavily militarized [special military operation]” Peskow told RT Arabic. “And how [Russian President Vladimir] Putin said yesterday that one of the tasks is the demilitarization of Ukraine. In fact, this task is largely complete. Ukraine is using less of its own weapons. And it is using more and more weapon systems that Western countries are supplying to it.”
The alleged demilitarization goal of the invasion of Ukraine was recently criticized by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin and leader of the Wagner Group, a private paramilitary entity, during a series of critical statements about the conflict as his troops withdrew from the battlefield in Ukraine Bachmut.
Prigozhin argued that the invasion backfired because Ukraine had been more heavily armed by its allies to hold off Russian forces.
A Ukrainian soldier fires a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). On Saturday, Russian officials claimed that Ukraine had indeed been demilitarized – in line with the goals of Moscow’s invasion of the eastern European country – despite clear and significant evidence to the contrary. Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images
“The special military operation served to denazify and demilitarize,” said the Wagner boss. “As for demilitarization … if they had 500 tanks at the start of the special operation, 1687130253 You have 5,000 tanks. If there were 20,000 people who could skillfully fight, now 400,000 people know how to fight. How did we demilitarize it? It turns out the opposite is true – we’ve fucking militarized them.”
Newsweek has emailed foreign defense experts for comment.
Since the invasion began, Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars in military aid from Western allies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. According to Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) statistics, summarizing data from January 2020 to last May, the US alone has supplied Ukraine with tens of thousands of infantry weapons, hundreds of artillery systems, hundreds of tanks, hundreds of armored carriers. and more.