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 added.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
In order to demilitarize the Ukrainian troops based in Crimea, Russia sent the army's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) forces, the president said.
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.
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.
He acknowledged that there were some Crimean people, particularly members of the Crimean Tatar minority, who opposed the Russian operation.
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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