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Putin
in film on Crimea: US masterminds behind Ukraine coup, helped train
radicals
RT,
March,
2015
The
Ukrainian armed coup was organized from Washington, Russian President
Vladimir Putin stated in an interview for a new documentary aired
Sunday. The Americans tried to hide behind the Europeans, but Moscow
saw through the trick, he dded.
“The
trick of the situation was that outwardly the [Ukrainian] opposition
was supported mostly by the Europeans. But we knew for sure that the
real masterminds were our American friends,”Putin
said in a documentary, 'Crimea - The Way Home,' aired by Rossiya 1
news channel.
“They
helped training the nationalists, their armed groups, in Western
Ukraine, in Poland and to some extent in Lithuania,” he
added. “They
facilitated the armed coup.”
The
West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with
Russia, “by any means, in
any format and under any scheme," he
noted.
Putin
said this approach was far from being the best dealing with any
country, and a post-Soviet country like Ukraine specifically. Such
countries have a short record of living under a new political system
and remain fragile. Violating constitutional order in such a country
inevitably deal a lot of damage to its statehood, the president said.
READ
MORE: US
boosting ‘anti-propaganda’ budget, mulling ‘increase of
lethality’ for Ukraine support – Nuland
“The
law was thrown away and crashed. And the consequences were grave
indeed. Part of the country agreed to it, while another part wouldn’t
accept it. The country was shattered,” Putin
explained.
He
also accused the beneficiaries of the coup of planning an
assassination of then-President Viktor Yanukovich. Russia was
prepared to act to ensure his escape, Putin said.
“I
invited the heads of our special services, the Defense Ministry and
ordered them to protect the life of the Ukrainian president.
Otherwise he would have been killed,” he
said, adding that at one point Russian signal intelligence, which was
tracking the president’s motorcade route, realized that he was
about to be ambushed.
Yanukovich
himself didn’t want to leave and rejected the offer to be evacuated
from Donetsk, Putin said. Only after spending several days in Crimea
and realizing that “there
was no one he could negotiate with in Kiev”
he asked to be taken to Russia.
The
Russian president personally ordered preparation of the Crimean
special operation the morning after Yanukovich fled, saying that “we
cannot let the [Crimean] people be pushed under the steamroller of
the nationalists.”
“I
[gave them] their tasks, told them what to do and how we must do it,
and stressed that we would only do it if we were absolutely sure that
this is what the people living in Crimea want us to do,” Putin
said. He added that an emergency public opinion poll indicated that
at least 75 percent of the people wanted to join Russia.
“Our
goal was not to take Crimea by annexing it. Our final goal was to
allow the people express their wishes on how they want to live,” he
said.
“I
decided for myself: what the people want will happen. If they want
greater autonomy with some extra rights within Ukraine, so be it. If
they decide otherwise, we cannot fail them. You know the results of
the referendum. We did what we had to do,” Putin
said.
He
added that his personal involvement helped expedite things, because
the people carrying out his decision had no reason to hesitate.
According
to Putin, part of the operation was to deploy K-300P Bastion coastal
defense missiles to demonstrate Russia’s willingness to protect the
peninsula from military attack.
“We
deployed them in a way that made them seen clearly from space,” Putin
said.
The
president assured that the Russian military were prepared for any
developments and would have armed nuclear weapons if necessary. He
personally was not sure that Western nations would not use military
force against Russia, he added.
“A
specific set of personnel was needed to block and demilitarize 20,000
people, who were well-armed. Not only in quantity, but in
quality,” Putin
said, adding that he gave orders to the Defense Ministry to “deploy
the special forces of the GRU, together with marine forces and
paratroopers.”
However,
according to Putin, the number of Russian forces did not exceed the
limit of 20,000 authorized under the agreement on basing the Russian
Black Sea Fleet at its military base in Crimea.
“As
we didn’t exceed the number of personnel on our base in Crimea,
strictly speaking, nothing was violated,”
he said.
The
Russian president added that the move to send additional Russian
troops to secure Crimea and allow a referendum to be freely held
there prevented major bloodshed on the peninsula.
“Considering
the ethnic composition of the Crimean population, the violence there
would have been worse [than in Kiev]. We had to act to prevent
negative development, not to allow tragedies like the one that
happened in Odessa, where dozens of people were burned alive,” Putin
said.
He
acknowledged that there were some Crimean people, particularly
members of the Crimean Tatar minority, who opposed the Russian
operation.
“Some
of the Crimean Tatars were under the influence of their leaders, some
of whom are so to speak ‘professional’ fighters for the rights of
the Tatars,” he
explained.
But
at the same time the “Crimean militia worked together with the
Tatars. And there were Tatars among the militia members,” he
stressed.
The
Crimean people voted in a referendum to join Russia after rejecting a
coup-imposed government that took power in Kiev in February 2014. The
move sparked a major international controversy, as the new
government’s foreign backers accused Russia of annexing the
peninsula through military force.
Moscow
insists that the move was a legitimate act of self-determination and
that the Russian troops acted only to provide security and not as an
occupying force. Russian officials cite the example of Kiev’s
military crackdown on the dissenting eastern Donetsk and Lugansk
regions, which claimed more than 6,000 lives since April 2014, as an
example of bloodshed that Russia acted to prevent in Crimea.
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