At his press conference, Vladimir Putin commented on issues related to the integrity of Ukraine and security on the European continent solely in terms of their understanding by the Kremlin: NATO and official Kyiv themselves must guarantee the security of Russia and its interests, and not demand guarantees from Moscow of non-aggression against Ukraine. And this is after the Russian occupation of Crimea and part of the territory of the Ukrainian Donbas, as well as the concentration of 150 thousand Russian strike forces on the borders of Ukraine.
It would be if Nazi Germany, after the Anschluss of Austria and the capture of the Sudetenland, would demand guarantees of its security from the Western countries. The broken down Winston Churchill, with such phraseology from Moscow, probably just spinning in his grave. It was not for nothing that he said after World War II that the fascists of the future would present themselves as anti-fascists. It's about the modern Kremlin and its ideology.
Another historical passage of Vladimir Putin to journalists that Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin left everyone speechless. This is probably why no one in the audience parried the Russian president, whose grade in history is between E and F. Let me remind you that it was Vladimir Lenin who destroyed the Ukrainian statehood of 1917-1921. Exactly 104 years ago, at the end of December 1917, Bolshevik Moscow sent an ultimatum to the Central Rada, but it was rejected in Kyiv, and then the 30,000-strong Red Army crossed the border with the aim of capturing Ukraine. In 1921, Bolshevik Russia signed the Riga Peace Treaty with Poland, after which the western part of Ukraine fell under the control of Warsaw, and the central and eastern part became a Soviet republic. So it entered the USSR created by Lenin, and only because the Bolsheviks promised the workers - factories, the peasants - the land, and the Ukrainians the all-round development of language and culture, which was realized in the 1920s.
But then Stalin's Moscow abolished everything: the factories were transferred to the state, the land was transferred to collective farms, the Ukrainian language and culture were thrown to the outskirts of public life, plus political persecution for those who disagree, and the Holodomor as revenge for independence from the Bolsheviks in 1917-21. But even in such conditions, back in the 30s, 90% of education in Donbas was in the Ukrainian language. Therefore, Vladimir Putin's claim that Russians and Russian-speakers are being squeezed out of Ukraine is not understandable, given that in Russia millions of Ukrainians do not have a single Ukrainian school or Ukrainian-language theater at all.
The only historical accuracy in Putin's statements is that California was formerly Mexican. But then excuse me, before the Volga region and Siberia were part of the Golden Horde, and the Far East was Chinese. For some reason, Vladimir Putin also recalled the statement by the adviser to the American President Woodrow Wilson in 1918 that it would be advisable to divide Russia into several parts in the European part, as well as in the Asian part. This angered the Russian president very much, they say, you see how the Americans wanted to divide us then, and, probably, would like to do it today. Again, let me remind those ignoramuses from Moscow that at the end of 1918 the former tsarist Russia was divided into thirty! state associations, and not a few. And only the iron policy of Vladimir Lenin allowed most of them to be returned to the Soviet Union. Therefore, it is a sin for Vladimir Vladimirovich to complain about Lenin, otherwise he would have lived now in one-thirtieth of the territory of imperial Russia, the greatness of which remained dreams and fantasies.
At the press conference, we once again heard an outright lie that the population of Crimea itself was in favor of joining Russia. The head of the Kremlin forgot that he had sent special forces to seize the buildings of the parliament and the government of the autonomy of the peninsula, and in Sevastopol the Russian agents put a man who was allegedly elected in the crowd at the head of the city - this is such a legal procedure. At the same time, elections in Crimea were held in two weeks and at gunpoint from Russian machine guns. There was no such "outpouring" even in any African Bantustan. In Kyiv, Putin called the events of February 2014 a coup d'état, although the transfer of power took place within the framework of the constitutional field of Ukraine, the former president simply abandoned his country and fled to his patrons.
Putin also gave a traditional interpretation of the events in Donbas, saying that Russia is not an occupier, but a mediator. But Ukraine, Russia and as an OSCE mediator participate in the Trilateral Contact Group - this has been the case since 2014. And Paragraph 10 of the Minsk Agreements requires the withdrawal of all foreign troops and volunteers, that is, the Russian army and Cossacks, from the territories temporarily not controlled by the Ukrainian government, and this is written in the document.
The head of the Russian Federation again accuses Kyiv of non-compliance with Minsk and forgets that it is Moscow that is torpedoing the implementation of even the first paragraph of a ceasefire on the contact line. There was also an accusation that Ukraine wants to attack the Donbas, so Moscow will not abandon its own. But why are the Russian troops stationed near Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, have become more active in Crimea - there it is far from Donbas. The press secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the official representative of the Office of the President of Ukraine M. Podolyak have already disavowed the fake about Kyiv's preparations for an offensive in Donbas. But everyone has the impression that it is Moscow that is preparing to create a provocation in the Donbas in order to create a pretext for an attack, as they did in Finland in November 1939.
The bottom line after the press conference of Vladimir Putin is gloomy: there is the smell of political naphthalene from the times of the USSR and the aftertaste of Soviet propaganda in a new package. A feeling of what has long been seen. It becomes obvious that the Kremlin is finally turning into a bureau of inventions and fakes. But it is extremely dangerous to build state policy on them. Kyiv and the collective West need to be alert.
