Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned on Wednesday that Moscow’s motion in Ukraine was meant to cease a “war” that has raged in japanese Ukraine for a few years.

Speaking at a gathering with veterans, Putin mentioned Moscow had lengthy sought to negotiate a settlement to the battle in Ukraine’s japanese industrial heartland of Donbas, the place Russia-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014.

“Large-scale combat operations involving heavy weapons, artillery, tanks and aircraft haven’t stopped in Donbas since 2014,” Putin mentioned. “All that we are doing today as part of the special military operation is an attempt to stop this war. This is the meaning of our operation — protecting people who live on those territories.” On Wednesday, Putin once more insisted that Russia had tried to negotiate a peaceable settlement earlier than sending in troops, however “we were just duped and cheated”.

He described Ukraine’s east as Russia’s “historic territories”, including that Moscow conceded their loss after the 1991 Soviet collapse however had to act to defend Russian audio system there.

Putin has defined his determination to ship troops into Ukraine on February 24 by the necessity to defend Russian audio system and conduct “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine to stop it from posing a menace to Russia — claims rejected by Ukraine and its Western allies as a canopy for an unprovoked act of aggression.

Putin attended the assembly with veterans throughout Wednesday’s go to to St. Petersburg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Red Army breaking the Nazi siege of town on January 18, 1943.

The siege of town that was then referred to as Leningrad lasted almost 900 days and was solely absolutely lifted in January 1944, marking one of many bloodiest pages of World War II.

About 1 million individuals died in Leningrad through the siege, most of them from hunger.

Putin on Wednesday laid a wreath on the metropolis’s Piskaryov memorial cemetery the place 420,000 civilian victims of the siege and 70,000 Soviet troopers have been buried. He additionally put flowers in a bit the place his brother, who died as a baby through the siege, was buried in a mass grave.

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