Putin Says He Regrets Not Taking Military Action in Ukraine Sooner, Trusted the West
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel slipped and said the Minsk agreements were an effective ruse to give Ukraine time to “get stronger”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview on Wednesday that he regretted waiting so long to act militarily in Ukraine — having been hoodwinked by Western politicians over the years.
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“The only thing we can regret is that we did not start our active actions earlier, believing that we were dealing with decent people,” he told journalist Pavel Zarubin, according to RT.
In 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel slipped and said the Minsk agreements were an effective ruse to give Ukraine time to “get stronger” for its next conflict with Russia. She said Ukraine used the ceasefire after the two peace deals as a time to get stronger, “as you can see today.”
“The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltseve in early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine,” she said.
TRENDPOST: Following the U.S.-led coup that overthrew Ukraine’s President Victor Yanukovych in early 2014, Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine and align with Russia.
During the 2014 uprising, some 97 percent of the citizens of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea voted to leave Ukraine for integration of the region into the Russian Federation.
That year, Ukraine and Russian separatists agreed to the 12-point Minsk Agreement that called for a ceasefire in the region, but both sides violated the deal. In February 2015, the Minsk II Agreement, created by France and Germany, also called for a ceasefire, which Ukraine violated.
Russia said the deal required Kyiv to allow separatist authorities to form their own central government. Ukraine said it will never allow Moscow to have a de facto veto on foreign policy decisions.
Putin said in a recent interview that Moscow “sincerely” tried to implement the agreement, and said he believed that Luhansk and Donetsk would somehow be able to “reunite with Ukraine, following the Minsk agreements.”
But he now said it is obvious that his recent annexations of these areas should have occurred earlier because “maybe then there wouldn’t have been so many casualties among civilians and children.”
Putin correctly highlighted the real reason Ukrainians continue to die on the battlefield, and how peace could have been achieved diplomatically if the West wasn’t so fixated on trying to eliminate its Russian rival.
He noted in October that it was not Moscow that organized the 2014 coup.
Putin continued: “It wasn’t us who intimidated the Crimeans and Sevastopol residents with Nazi-style ethnic purges. We weren’t the ones who tried to force the Donbass to obey using shellings and bombings. We were not the ones who threatened violence against those who wanted to speak their native language.”
Putin expressed dismay after learning about Merkel’s comments about the agreement and said he believed Germany “treated us with sincerity.”
“It turned out later that we were being deceived in this regard, because both the former German chancellor and the former president of France admitted straightforwardly in public that they never planned to fulfill the agreements. Instead, they were buying time to deliver more weapons to the Kyiv regime, which is exactly what they did,” Putin said on Wednesday.
TRENDPOST: Completely absent in the American media reports of the current U.S. stand with Ukraine is the role Washington and Victoria Nuland played in the overthrow of its government in 2014.
A report from 2014 in The Trends Journal laid out the political maneuvers at the time in Ukraine: “Washington’s coup in Ukraine brought not only a threat to the Russian population in Ukraine but also a direct strategic threat to Russia itself.”
Nuland, who speaks Russian and French, boasted that Washington had invested $5 billion in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine, and sold the bullshit line that the purpose of NGOs is to “teach democracy.”
Nuland is now Under Secretary for Political Affairs and still plays a role in U.S.-Ukraine policy.
TREND FORECAST: The White House will not allow Ukraine to officially lose to Russia and give up 20 percent of its territory that Russia has annexed and/or sign an agreement that it will never join NATO.