What Putin wants to change with the military campaign in Ukraine

(Dan Tri) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow should have decided to launch a military campaign in Ukraine earlier and prepared more carefully.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo: TASS).

"You know, if I could look at the situation in 2022, knowing what is happening now, what would I think? I think that the decision (to launch a military operation in Ukraine) should have been made earlier," Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his year-end press conference on December 19.

“Second, we should have started preparing for these operations, including special military operations,” he added.

The Kremlin chief admitted that Russia's military operations in 2022 began without careful preparation and that the events in the Crimean peninsula after the 2014 Ukrainian coup were spontaneous.

“Why did we decide to act? Because we cannot stand still and wait for the situation to get worse for us,” he stressed.

He recalled that the then Ukrainian authorities had declared that they would not comply with the Minsk agreements and had made statements about possessing weapons of mass destruction.

"We were forced to take these actions. If we had known what was going to happen, we would have prepared more systematically," he said.

President Putin also stressed the complexity of the ongoing conflict, saying it was difficult to predict how long the fighting would last.

"Combat operations are very complex, so making predictions is difficult and unnecessary," he said, reiterating that Moscow is aiming at the goals outlined at the start of the military campaign, which are "neutralization, demilitarization and demilitarization of Ukraine."

On the other hand, he affirmed that Russia has never ruled out the possibility of negotiations.

President Putin said that Russia is always ready to negotiate with the legitimate authorities of Kiev without any preconditions, except for those agreed in Istanbul (Türkiye) in 2022.

Those preliminary agreements included Ukraine committing to neutrality, military non-alignment, as well as certain restrictions on the deployment of foreign weapons.

President Putin also noted that such negotiations would have to respect the realities that have developed since then. Moscow demanded that Ukraine recognize the territories that have been annexed to Russia, including Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia.

With Russia gaining the upper hand on the battlefield, observers say it is difficult for Moscow to make concessions on the terms of peace talks.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Kiev is in no hurry to negotiate and compromise with Russia. He revealed that Ukraine's current priority is to build relations with the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump, who declared that he is capable of ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict within 24 hours.

Source: https://dantri.com.vn/the-gioi/dieu-ong-putin-muon-thay-doi-voi-chien-dich-quan-su-o-ukraine-20241220111917257.htm