State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin believes that if Russia had not launched a special military operation in Ukraine right now, then “literally the next day” NATO would have launched its operation through the hands of Ukrainian nationalists.
“If the operation had not started (of Russia in Ukraine – ed.), literally the next day the operation would have started from NATO, but only by the hands of Bandera, neo-Nazis of Ukraine. We managed, which means we saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Volodin said on the TV channel “Russia 24”.
The parliamentarian stressed that Russia had no other choice.
“Just look how intensively NATO has been supplying Ukraine with weapons. If only they hadn’t started a special peacekeeping operation, all this would have led to tragic consequences. For everyone,” he added.
On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed decrees recognizing the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which had declared their independence from Kyiv back in 2014, and early on the morning of February 24, Russia launched a military operation to demilitarize Ukraine. Putin called its goal “the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.” For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine”, to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for “bloody crimes against civilians” in Donbass.
According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops, nothing threatens the civilian population. With the support of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the DPR and LPR groups are developing an offensive. But there is no talk of the occupation of Ukraine, the President of Russia stressed.