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Putin does not attend Gorbachev’s funeral. The ceremony is on Saturday, without state honors and will be in the same place where Stalin was
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the military campaign that Moscow launched in Ukraine aims to put an end to an “anti-Russian enclave” that the neighboring country is creating and that threatens Russia.
“On the territory of today’s Ukraine, they began to create an anti-Russian enclave that threatens our country,” the Kremlin chief said at a meeting with students in Kaliningrad, an enclave on the Baltic Sea coast, situated between Lithuania and Poland. which belongs to Russia despite not sharing a land border.
“Our soldiers fight there, many die, they defend the inhabitants of Donbass and Russia itself, and this certainly deserves the support of the whole society”Putin declared at the start of classes, broadcast live on Russian state television.
This is not a childish question, but it is quite understandable. In fact, they started a war against us that lasted eight years. Our task, the mission of our soldiers, is to end this war, to defend the people,” he maintained.
The president has rejected Western accusations that Russia is carrying out aggression against Ukraine.
“Everyone believes that there is aggression from Russia, but no one knows or understands that after the 2014 coup in Ukraine, most of the inhabitants of Donetsk and Lugansk and those of Crimea did not want to recognize the results of the coup. d’état,” the Russian leader noted.
Putin was referring to the popular uprising in kyiv that ended with the flight of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, currently a refugee in Russia.
Once again, the Russian president insisted that Ukraine never existed as a state before the rise of the Soviet Union and that the communist regime created the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, to which it handed over vast ancestral Russian territories.
Source: Observadora
