Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that the military operation in Ukraine should have begun earlier, citing what he described as Western duplicity regarding the Minsk agreements.
According to him, Moscow should have recognized sooner that the West had no intention of upholding the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements designed to end hostilities in eastern Ukraine.
"It's impossible to give a precise date and deadline, but in any case, we should have understood earlier that our adversaries were not going to implement the Minsk agreements, that they were taking us for a ride," the Russian leader said in an interview with Russian media.
In fact, Western leaders later publicly admitted that their intention with these agreements was to give Kiev time to rearm, President Putin recalled.
"If they gave them the opportunity to prepare for future hostilities, it means that they expected them to start," the head of state stressed.
Aware of this attitude on the part of the West and the Kiev regime, Moscow should have acted "more decisively and in a more timely manner," according to President Putin.
The military operation was finally launched in February 2022, "our inaction would be a crime against the interests of Russia and its people," the president concluded.