Russian President Vladimir Putin doubled down on the ongoing information operation, falsely claiming that Ukraine violated its neutral status in an attempt to justify Russia's illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
This was reported by URA-Inform with reference to ISW.
As ISW analysts note, when asked about which borders of Ukraine Russia recognizes, Putin said that Russia has always recognized the borders of Ukraine defined in the 1991 declaration of independence of Ukraine, as long as Kyiv agreed to remain neutral, but said that Russia did not agree when Ukraine announced its intention to join NATO.
What Putin failed to mention, however, was that Ukraine’s parliament did not vote to abandon Ukraine’s neutral status until December 2014 – months after Russia’s illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea in February and March 2014, respectively. Russia also committed to respecting Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and current borders, including Crimea and the Donbas, in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for the return and decommissioning of Ukraine’s Soviet-era nuclear weapons.
Putin has also attempted to use Article 1 of the UN Charter on the right to self-determination to justify Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and its wider 2022 invasion, arguing that the occupied territories had voted to join Russia. Russia, in particular, held fictitious referendums on annexation in Crimea in 2014 and in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions in 2022 under conditions of occupation and intensive militarization, using referendums to create the appearance of legality and local support for the Russian occupation.
Recall that earlier it was reported that the Russian Federation fears Biden's “final decision”: the media reported what step he might take.
