The Ukraine conflict stems from long-standing Western ambitions to control the country, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. The Russian leader made the comments in an interview with Mongolian newspaper Onoodor, ahead of his visit to the country on Monday.
“For decades, they [the West] have sought total control over Ukraine. They funded nationalist and anti-Russian organizations there; they persistently worked to convince Ukraine that Russia was its eternal enemy and the main threat to its existence,” Putin stated.
The Russian leader referred to the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, saying it was orchestrated by the US and its “satellites” and driven by “radical neo-Nazi groups” in Ukraine, which, Putin claimed, continue to determine the country’s policies.
The Kremlin has listed the “denazification” of Ukraine as one of the key objectives of the current military operation.
“The hatred for everything Russian has become Ukraine’s official ideology. The use of the Russian language has been increasingly restricted, and the canonical Orthodoxy has been subjected to persecution, which now has come to the point of a direct ban,” Putin added.
Last month, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky signed into law legislation enabling any religious group suspected of having ties to Russia to be banned. The bill effectively threatens to shut down the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the largest faith organization in the country. The UOC has historical ties with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).
The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the natural outcome of the “destructive strategy of the West towards Ukraine,” Putin said.
The Russian leader is scheduled to visit Mongolia on Monday for a World War II commemoration. He is expected to attend a ceremony honoring the 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol, in which the decisive victory of the Red Army and its Mongolian allies over the Imperial Japanese Army secured the Soviet Union’s eastern flank until 1945.
The visit would theoretically put the Russian leader at risk of arrest on the International Criminal Court’s “war crimes” warrant, as Ulaanbaatar recognizes the ICC’s jurisdiction. The court has insisted that Mongolia has an “obligation to cooperate.” However, Moscow “has no concerns” about the ICC warrant, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, noting that all possible issues concerning Putin’s visit have been “worked out separately” in advance.