The West and particularly the US are to blame for the crisis, the Russian president insists
The tragic events currently unfolding in Ukraine started with the US-backed 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said, stressing that the West is to blame for the conflict.
Putin was speaking with heads of international news agencies on Wednesday, on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
“Everyone [in the West] believes that Russia started the war in Ukraine. But no one – I want to emphasize this – no one in the West, in Europe, wants to remember how this tragedy began,” the president said, responding to a question by German journalist.
“It began with a coup in Ukraine – an unconstitutional coup d’etat. This is the beginning of the war. Well, is Russia to blame for this coup? No.”
The Russian leader pointed out that everyone seems to have forgotten how the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany and France arrived in Kiev and signed the Minsk agreements as guarantors on peacefully resolving the crisis in Ukraine.
These countries now prefer not to remember this, instead they decided to resolve the conflict by use of arms against civilians in Eastern Ukraine, Putin said.
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