Four days before Russia launched Europe’s biggest military conflict since the end of World War II, the Kremlin gave strong assurances that it had no intention of aggression, saying Russia had never attacked anyone in its history.

“We appeal to reason, we demand an answer to this question: ‘What is the point of Russia attacking someone?'” Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov told a Moscow reporter.

“We call on them [pe occidentali] remember history But let’s say, as we have seen recently, the West knows little about history. But let’s remind them that in our entire history, Russia has never attacked anyone,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said.

“Russia, which has gone through many wars, is the last country in Europe that wants to speak, even utter the word ‘war,'” a Russian official emphasized on February 20.

A day later, Vladimir Putin, in a humorous speech broadcast on Russian television, recognized the de facto independence of the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, proclaimed by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Immediately after that, the head of the Kremlin ordered the Russian armed forces to enter these Ukrainian territories in order to “preserve peace.”

Literally a day later, the Russian president declared that he recognizes the sovereignty of the separatists over the entire territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and not only over the areas controlled by them.

However, evidence that emerged later showed that Putin recorded a video message declaring war on Ukraine as early as the evening of February 21 when he was hosting separatist leaders in Moscow, an event that was apparently carefully planned before Peskov gave assurances the day before that Russia did not attack anyone.

The head of Russian intelligence called fears of an invasion of Ukraine “US propaganda”

In November 2021, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Serhiy Naryshkin, in turn, assured that Russia does not plan to invade Ukraine, and any suggestion to the contrary is “malicious propaganda” by the United States.

“I have to calm everyone down. This will not happen,” said Naryshkin in an interview with one of the Moscow state TV channels.

He noted that “everything that is currently happening around this topic is, of course, malicious propaganda by the US State Department.”

Naryshkin’s remarks came a day after the top US diplomat for European affairs in Washington said all options were being considered on how to respond to the Russian military build-up near the Ukrainian border.

On November 12, the United States sounded the first alarm, with Washington officials directly warning that Russia was preparing for an invasion.

The American newspaper The Washington Post was the first to announce on November 30, 2021, based on satellite images and sources from the United States intelligence community, that Russia is again massing troops along the border with Ukraine, 8 years after the illegal annexation. of Crimea and the beginning of the separatist war in Donbas.

Russia claimed that it did not attack Ukraine even after the start of the war

On March 10, at a press conference in Turkey after peace talks with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia did not attack Ukraine. This would be the first and last meeting of the foreign ministers of the two countries after the start of the war.

“We do not plan to attack other countries, we did not attack Ukraine either,” Lavrov said after journalists asked him an uncomfortable question: whether Russia plans to attack other countries as well.

“I simply repeatedly explained to Ukraine that a situation has arisen that poses direct threats to the security of the Russian Federation. Despite our many years of notes, appeals, appeals, no one heard us,” added the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

He also stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly “spoken clearly” on this topic.

In fact, the Russian president repeated this thesis just a few days ago, in his nearly two-hour hallucinatory speech to the Russian parliament on Tuesday, saying that Western countries are the ones who “started the conflict” while Russia was forced to “use force to stop it.”

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