Putin accuses US over Ukraine coup
What you need to know:
- The West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with Russia, “by any means, in any format and under any scheme,” he noted.
- In the more than two-hour-long documentary, President Putin also accused the beneficiaries of the coup of planning an assassination of then-President Yanukovich who was overthrown in February 2014 and said Russia was prepared to act to ensure his escape.
- Yanukovich himself didn’t want to leave and rejected the offer to be evacuated from Donetsk, Mr Putin said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the US of masterminding the armed coup that led to the ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich last year.
In an interview for a new documentary, the Russian president said Americans tried to hide behind Europeans.
“The trick of the situation was that outwardly the [Ukrainian] opposition was supported mostly by the Europeans. But we knew for sure that the real masterminds were our American friends,” President Putin said in the documentary, ‘Crimea - The Way Home,’ aired by Rossiya 1 news channel.
“They helped training the nationalists, their armed groups, in Western Ukraine, in Poland and to some extent in Lithuania,” he added.
“They facilitated the armed coup.”
The West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with Russia, “by any means, in any format and under any scheme,” he noted.
According to Mr Putin, this approach was far from being the best dealing with any country, and a post-Soviet country like Ukraine specifically. Such countries have a short record of living under a new political system and remain fragile. Violating constitutional order in such a country inevitably deal a lot of damage to its statehood, the president said.
“The law was thrown away and crashed. And the consequences were grave indeed. Part of the country agreed to it, while another part wouldn’t accept it. The country was shattered,” Putin explained, as quoted by Rt.com.
In the more than two-hour-long documentary, President Putin also accused the beneficiaries of the coup of planning an assassination of then-President Yanukovich who was overthrown in February 2014 and said Russia was prepared to act to ensure his escape.
“I invited the heads of our special services, the Defense Ministry and ordered them to protect the life of the Ukrainian president. Otherwise he would have been killed,” he said, adding that at one point Russian signal intelligence, which was tracking the president’s motorcade route, realized that he was about to be ambushed.
Yanukovich himself didn’t want to leave and rejected the offer to be evacuated from Donetsk, Mr Putin said.
Meanwhile, Russia will deploy Tupolev nuclear-capable bomber jets to Crimea in a snap drill, a defence ministry source said today, as the peninsula marks a year since its annexation by Moscow.
“As part of a snap check of combat readiness of the armed forces, Tupolev 22-M3 strategic missile-carriers will be deployed to Crimea,” the source told Russian news agencies, without giving a specific date.
