UKRAINE WAR
Moscow, 28 March (EFE).- The Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, reiterated today that the Russian military offensive in Ukraine is not aimed at changing the government in Kyiv.
“The ongoing special military operation was just a reaction to Kiev’s criminal steps towards these republics (pro-Russian separatists from Donetsk and Luhansk), a timely and preventive measure,” he said at a meeting with his Algerian counterpart Nureddin Makri.
“Documents were found with evidence that Kyiv was preparing a large-scale attack and intended to destroy them,” he said, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself called “false” in an interview with Russian media on Sunday.
“Therefore, the goal of our special operation in Ukraine is not regime change in Kyiv, as the West is trying to present it, but to protect people from genocide, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” Patrushev added.
The secretary of the Russian Security Council therefore repeated the Kremlin’s same argument to justify what Moscow calls a “military special operation” in Ukraine.
Earlier this year, he said, “the Kyiv authorities openly refused to implement the Minsk agreements on a peaceful solution in the Donbass, announced plans to produce nuclear weapons in the country, and also assembled a group of armed forces of almost 100,000 soldiers with heavy weapons on the eastern border of Ukraine”.
“Russia could not stand aside under the current conditions and was constitutionally obliged to protect its pro-Russian compatriots in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, to which it distributed more than 700,000 passports in recent years, he said. .
“In our place, any state would do that,” he said.