According to Kremlin master Vladimir Putin, Russia was not ready for a major war with Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. “We didn’t have hypersonic weapons then, but now we have it,” Putin said in an interview with Russian state television on Sunday.
Russia uses hypersonic weapons episodically until now. “There are other modern systems, in 2014 there was nothing like that,” the president said and repeated that Russia at that time wanted to resolve the conflict in Ukraine peacefully.
“We have a lot to do – for example, to expand ground units,” V. Putin said when asked about February 24, 2022, when he began the lessons of the war against Ukraine. He also answered the question whether special military operations should not have been launched earlier, since Ukraine did not have such weapons then. V. Putin said that in 2014 Russia was not ready to take “bigger steps” than when it annexed Crimea.
At the same time, V. Putin accused the government of kyiv and the West of arming Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea and the start of military operations in the Donbass nine years ago. “It has now turned out, as we see, that we were simply led by the nose. None of our so-called partners intended to resolve anything peacefully,” V. Putin said. The Western partners are said to have “simply pumped arms into Ukraine and prepared for military action”.
V. Putin pleaded for the invasion of Ukraine, among other things, by the fact that he wanted to anticipate the strike of the Ukrainian armed forces against Donbass.
Source: The Delfi
