President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, during a speech to Russian veterans of the Second World War, announced another alleged goal of the “special forces operation” against Ukraine, Interfax reports.

During a visit to St. Petersburg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Nazi German army breaking the blockade of Leningrad, as the Soviet-era Baltic Sea port city was called, Putin said Russia was trying to end “military operations” in Donbas, which he said have not stopped since 2014.

“In fact, since 2014, large-scale hostilities with the use of heavy equipment, artillery, tanks, aviation have not stopped in Donbas… Everything we are doing today, including as part of a military special operation, is an attempt to stop it. this,” said the head of the Kremlin.

“This is the meaning of our operation,” he emphasized, adding another goal: “to protect our people who live there, in these territories.”

He also noted that Russia “could not but react” to the events that took place in Ukraine in 2014.

Vladimir Putin said that Russia was “led by the nose”

“We suffered for a long time, tried to come to an agreement for a long time. As it turns out now, we were simply led by the nose, deceived,” Putin said to Russian veterans.

“This is not the first time this has happened to us. However, we did everything possible to resolve this situation peacefully,” he assured.

“Now it has become obvious that this is impossible by definition,” Vladimir Putin said.

It will be recalled that pro-Russian separatists from the east of Ukraine started a separatist conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, located in the territory historically known as Donbas, immediately after Moscow illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.

Despite ample evidence of this, Russia has for years denied any ties to or military support for the separatists, saying they are just “Russian patriots” fighting independently against Kiev’s oppression.

The constantly changing objectives of the “military special operation”

The Russian president’s new comments came after Russia’s foreign minister in late December, 10 months after the February 24 invasion, offered yet another justification for the war of aggression launched against Ukraine.

“In order to neutralize security threats that have reached an unacceptable level, the leadership of the Russian Federation has taken difficult but necessary steps,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation noted on December 29 in a document published on its website, which presents its “results” in terms of foreign policy on 2022 year.

It claimed that Moscow’s “decisive actions” revealed the “true intentions and approaches of Western countries” towards Russia, which included “the intention to inflict a strategic defeat on our country” and “remove it from the global geopolitical arena”.

“At the same time, they risked the 30-year period of Russia’s honest attempts to build equal interaction with the collective West,” added the Russian Foreign Ministry.

In a speech announcing last February that he had ordered Russian forces to launch a “special military operation” in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin said the goals of the invasion were to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine.

The Kremlin claims that Russia has never attacked anyone in its entire history

However, in April, Sergey Lavrov found a new justification for invading Ukraine, saying that the purpose of the war was to put an end to the “reckless expansion of the United States” and other Western powers.

But Lavrov’s comments also came after Lt. Gen. Ihor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Moscow’s Defense Ministry, said Russia had entered Ukraine to neutralize “laboratories” developing biological weapons that would use birds to attack Russian territory.

On February 20, 3 days before the invasion, Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov also stated that Moscow had no intention of attacking Ukraine and that Russia had never invaded any country in its history.

These comments were repeated in March by Sergey Lavrov, the head of Russian diplomacy, saying that Moscow did not attack Ukraine and has no intention of attacking other countries.

Speaking in Moscow on Wednesday during his annual press conference during Putin’s stay in St Petersburg, Russia’s foreign minister made a series of wild claims, saying, among other things, that US and Western politicians had prepared a “final solution” for the Russians, as well , as Nazi Germany did for the Jews.

Follow the latest events of the 329th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.