West must face reality on Ukraine – Shoigu
Western nations can either keep pouring money into Kiev or acknowledge Moscow’s advantage on the battlefield and seek an off-ramp in the Ukraine conflict, Sergey Shoigu, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, has said.
The senior official was commenting on the current state of what Moscow calls a US-led proxy war against Russia during a meeting with his counterparts from post-Soviet states in Moscow on Thursday.
”Now, as the situation in the war theater is not going well for the Kiev regime, the West has a choice to make: Keep financing the regime and the destruction of the Ukrainian people or acknowledge the reality and start negotiating a deal,” Shoigu said.
Russian forces have been pushing back Ukrainian troops in multiple parts of the lengthy front line. The progress made in October was the largest for Moscow in months, according to media estimates.
According to Shoigu, the leadership in Kiev has caused great damage to country by aligning with American interests, arguing that the West failed to let the country develop peacefully. Instead, the country was “robbed with no shame” and “forcefully transformed into a weapon to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” he said.
“Their plan has failed,” he added. Kiev has become “a remotely controlled dangerous terrorist that, unlike international terrorist networks, has its own industry and territory it controls.”
Ukraine’s fate is typical for nations where the US has supported uprisings in the past, Shoigu argued. They all experienced a “decrease in living standards, weakening of economic capacity, uncontrolled siphoning of capital and resources,” he said, adding that in the worst cases, these nations became mere tools for Western elites.
The 2014 armed coup in Kiev, which the US and its allies supported, was a turning point in Russia-Ukraine relations. The new government in Kiev declared NATO membership as a key foreign policy goal, which Moscow perceives as a major security threat. They also adopted policies targeting the Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine, which Moscow says amounted to an attempt to eradicate Russian culture.
