MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin signed decrees on Monday (Feb 21) to recognise two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent statelets, defying Western warnings that such a step would be illegal and would kill off peace negotiations.
He signed the documents after delivering an astonishing verbal attack on Ukraine in an televised speech lasting nearly an hour, in which he said neo-Nazis were on the rise, oligarchic clans were rife and called Ukraine a US colony with a puppet regime.
Putin said Ukraine was a country with no tradition of independent statehood and an artificial creation of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin – a restatement of views he has expounded previously and which Kyiv has rejected as a false and self-serving view of history.
Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, Kyiv had taken advantage of Russia and subjected it to economic “blackmail”.
Now its aspiration to join NATO posed a direct threat to Russia’s security, he said.
“In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.”
Putin shrugged off Western threats of sanctions in the event of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
“They are trying to blackmail us again. They are threatening us again with sanctions, which, by the way, I think they will introduce anyway as Russia’s sovereignty strengthens and the power of our armed forces grows. And a pretext for another sanctions attack will always be found or fabricated.”
He said Russia “has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security. That is exactly what we will do”.
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