“In fact, the special military operation against Ukraine, against the Kiev regime, was launched to ensure the safety of the people of Donbass. This is correct. Now it is practically a war between Moscow and the collective West,” the Kremlin spokesman said. Recalling Putin’s statement about establishing a “cordon sanitaire” on the territory of Ukraine if the shelling of Russian regions continues, Peskov said that as the range of weapons delivered to Ukraine expands, so will the buffer zone, “that is, the distance that we will have to move Ukrainians away from our territories.”
During this one and half years inside special military operation (to use the official Russian phrase), Russian officials have given several reasons for its current action in Ukraine. One typical interesting reason came from Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekaev, who’s the acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, when in April 2022 he announced that Russia was fighting to establish a land corridor through Ukrainian territory connecting Russia to Crimea, the peninsula it annexed in 2014.
“Since the beginning of the second phase of the special operation, one of the tasks of the Russian Army is to establish full control over Donbas and Southern Ukraine. This will provide a land corridor to Crimea,” he said, according to TASS news agency.
According to him, if Russia could get control over Ukraine’s South, that would give the country’s forces access to Transnistria, a separatist statelet in Moldova, where a contingent of Russian forces has been stationed since the early 1990s. The tension between the neighbours has been bubbling for a while. The protracted conflict first brewed over in 2014 after the widespread Euromaidan protest in Ukraine forced the parliament to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office.
The removal of Yanukovych, who was regarded as pro-Russia, vexed the leadership in Moscow, and they thought the best way to strike back was to reclaim Ukraine’s region of Crimea, which used to be under Russia’s control from 1783 to 1954. The Kremlin then kicked off operation “Returning Crimea” and it engineered a series of pro-Russia protests across several areas in the city. The invasion of Crimea followed as the “little green men” – masked soldiers without insignia but with distinctly Russian weaponry and equipment – took to the city.
Russia then launched a referendum in the city, and in the infamously skewed plebiscite, a staggering 97 percent of the population voted for the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation. The annexation of Crimea by Russia was a blow to Ukraine. But the onslaught had not reached an end for Ukraine as Russia began to secretly provide weaponry support for separatists in the country’s eastern region.
This violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty helped the rebels claim control of the eastern city of Donbas with over 14,000 lives lost in the region. To end the bloody crisis, an agreement was hammered out in Minsk, Belarus, in February 2015.
The resolution tagged the ‘Minsk agreement’ was monitored by United Nations, and it proposed a ceasefire with all parties signing to power down their machinery of war. Despite a ceasefire agreement, both parties have not been at peace, and the Russia-backed rebels have claimed further swathes of land in the east of Ukraine.
At least between January and June this year, Deputy Russian Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev has interchangeably, that at different times, used the words such as military operation, crisis, conflicts and war in his speeches. The most recent statement, Medvedev said that Russia’s conflict with “Nazi Ukraine” would be permanent and if regime changed occurs in Kiev, new authorities would not ask to join NATO.
“What does this mean from a practical point of view? We don’t need Ukraine in NATO. In any case, until any remnant of this country remains in its present state. Therefore, for Nazi Ukraine the conflict will be permanent. And a new political regime in Kiev (if there is one) will definitely not ask for NATO membership,” Medvedev asserted.
According to Medvedev, negotiations are possible only on the subject of “post-conflict world order” and sees no point in conducting negotiations on the situation in Ukraine and around it at the moment. “This is certainly so. How can you engage in equal talks with a half-decayed neo-Nazi country, which is under external governance? Talks are possible only with its masters, namely with Washington. There is no one else to talk to. However, it is too early to speak about it,” the Russian official added. “That is why there is no need at all for any negotiations,” Medvedev wrote.
Any future Russian political leader that will try to change the discourse on the country’s development that emerged in 2022, will be perceived as a traitor, so there will be no return to the “pre-war” past, Medvedev opined on his Telegram channel commenting on “sweet dreams” of Russians who left the country about the return to previous times.
“As for peace plans being proposed, all of them should be considered,” Medvedev said during his May visit to Vietnam, commenting on peace initiatives put forward by China and other countries. On the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the Chinese Foreign Ministry published a document containing proposals for a political settlement of the Ukrainian crisis.