An immediate threat was being created near Russia's borders, an attack was being prepared, including on Russia's Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow on Monday.
"Preparations were openly underway for another punitive operation [in the Donbass], for an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea. Kiev was announcing the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the NATO bloc began active military development of the territories adjacent to us. This created an absolutely unacceptable threat for us, and directly at our borders," the head of state said. According to Putin, "everything said that a clash with the neo-Nazis, the Banderites, on whom the United States and its junior companions had staked, would be inevitable."
"I repeat, we saw how the military infrastructure was unfolding, how hundreds of foreign advisers began to work, there were regular deliveries of the most modern weapons from NATO countries. The danger was growing every day," said the head of state. - "Russia gave a preemptive response to aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only correct decision - the decision of a sovereign, strong, independent country".
Russian Army Soldiers
Putin said the Donbass militia and Russian army soldiers are fighting on their own soil, where their ancestors defeated the enemy.
"Today, the Donbass militia, together with soldiers of the Russian army, are fighting on their land, where Svyatoslav and Vladimir Monomakh's vigilantes, the soldiers of Rumyantsev and Potemkin, Suvorov and Brusilov, where the heroes of the Great Patriotic War - Nikolay Vatutin, Sidor Kovpak, Lyudmila Pavlichenko - stood to the death," the Russian president said.
"I now address our armed forces and the Donbass militia. You are fighting for the Motherland, for its future, so that no one forgets the lessons of World War II. So that there is no place in the world for executioners, punishers and Nazis," Putin stressed.
Soldiers from the war zone
Among those taking part in the parade on Red Square are servicemen who arrived directly from the combat zone in Donbass, the president said. "Now here on Red Square soldiers and officers from many regions of our vast motherland, including those who arrived directly from Donbass, directly from the war zone, are standing shoulder to shoulder he said.
"We remember how Russia's enemies tried to use gangs of international terrorists against us, sought to sow national and religious enmity in order to weaken, divide us from within. Nothing worked," said the president.
Putin stressed that today Russian servicemen of different nationalities cover each other in battle from bullets and shrapnel like brothers. "And this is the strength of Russia, the great, indestructible strength of our united multinational people. Today you defend what your fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought for. The highest meaning of their lives has always been the well-being and security of our homeland. And for us, their heirs, loyalty to the Fatherland is the main value, a reliable pillar of Russia's independence," he said.
"Those who crushed Nazism during the Great Patriotic War showed us an example of heroism for all time. This is a generation of winners, and we will always look up to them," concluded the head of state.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: Creative Commons
Based on materials from TASS