Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the deployment of Russian forces in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine will depend on the situation on the ground, where the clashes “continue” and worsen.
At a press conference in which he also called for international recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over the Ukrainian peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, Putin said that everything would depend on the development of events and “the situation on the ground.” The Russian president, speaking after a Senate mandate to send Russian troops out of the country, said fighting in the conflict zone was “ongoing” and tended to get worse.
“I did not say that the troops will go there now, but later,” the Russian president told reporters, adding that at the moment it is “impossible” to predict what will happen and everything will depend on the “concrete situation in the region.” The Russian leader insisted that Moscow recognized the independence of the self-proclaimed breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk because of Kiev’s refusal to abide by the Minsk agreements on a peaceful solution to the conflict in the region.
“The Minsk agreements died long before the Donbass republics were recognized,” Putin said, noting that “the agreements no longer exist.”
