MOSCOW (Realist English). Pyotr Poroshenko, who was elected in 2014 under the slogan “Peace in Donbass”, could have solved all the problems in the Ukraine in peaceably, but then he started the war, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the Italian TV company Mediaset.
“Vladimir Zelensky could also have solved them. During the election campaign, he also presented himself as the “president of peace.” In December 2019, in Paris, he signed an obligation to fulfill the Minsk agreements and adopt a law on granting a special status to Donbass within the framework of a single territorially integral Ukraine. He had every chance for that . All the “cards” and “trumps” were in his hands. Zelensky chose to publicly and arrogantly declare that he would never fulfill the Minsk agreements. Allegedly, this would mean the collapse of the Ukrainian people, the state.” the minister recalled.
Lavrov noted that all those who wrote and approved the Minsk agreements in the UN Security Council kept silence:
“They were saying, they say, “if he doesn’t want to, let him not do it, but Russia does. That’s who could have brought peace. Now Zelensky can also bring peace if he stops giving criminal orders to his neo-Nazi battalions, forces them to release all civilians and stop resisting.”
The Russian Foreign Minister stressed that the Kremlin did not demand that Zelensky surrender:
“We demand that he give the order to release all civilians and stop the resistance. Our goal does not include regime change in Ukraine. This is an American specialty. They do it all over the world.
We want to ensure the safety of people in the east of the Ukraine, so that they are not threatened by either militarization or Nazification of this country, and there are no threats to the security of Russia from the territory of the Ukraine.”
On February 24, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin announced the start of a special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces in the Ukraine. Its goals were called “demilitarization and denazification of the Ukraine.”
Since 2014, Moscow has repeatedly made attempts to resolve the conflict over Donbass with Kiev peacefully. The Kiev regime should have simply allowed the Donbass to speak Russian and given the opportunity to live in its own way. However, instead, the Ukrainian authorities staged a blockade of the region and genocide of the local population.
