Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to change the goals of the war in Ukraine because the country has failed to demilitarize and the West is preparing to accept it into the EU and NATO, the head of occupied Crimea Sergey Aksyonov has said.
“The situation is changing daily, I think that all the same and the goals will be adjusted one way or another, I personally have no doubt”, Aksyonov said in an interview with the TV channel Crimea 24.
According to him, Putin will have to outline the new goals of Russia in relation to Ukraine. Recall that before the start of a full-scale invasion in February 2022, he demanded to “demilitarize” and “denacify” the neighboring state.
The head of occupied Crimea stressed that he “initially” allowed a large part of Ukraine to join NATO and the EU in the event that Moscow failed to demilitarize it. “From now on, it will be difficult for us to talk about anything at all with them, to build something and everything else”, Aksenov admitted.
At the same time, he refused to publicly answer the question of where the borders between Ukraine and Russia would be drawn. According to him, it is a “painful” issue.
Earlier, Konstantin Zatulin, a member of the State Duma from the United Russia party, said that Russia had not achieved any of Putin’s goals in more than a year of military actions in Ukraine.
“What were our goals, officially declared at the beginning of the military operation? You all remember – denazification, demilitarization, neutrality of Ukraine and protection of the inhabitants of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, who have suffered all this time. On which of these points have we achieved results to date? None. Moreover, some of them have ceased to make any sense”, Zatulin said.
In addition, the deputy reminded that by annexing Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions, “we never entered the city of Zaporizhzhya, and we left the city of Kherson”. According to him, the originally conceived plan was “unrealistic” and it is necessary to move on to a new one.
Following these remarks, United Russia began to study the possibility of expelling Zatulin from the faction and stripping him of his post as first deputy chairman of the Duma’s committee on CIS affairs, sources in the party and the Kremlin told Vedomosti.
Zatulin responded by saying that his words had been taken out of context. “I was saying that the goals of the special operation have not been achieved at the moment, and in my opinion, no one should have any doubts, if they had been achieved, then the war would have stopped”, the deputy said.
The need to “stop the bloodshed” was also brought up by propagandists. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan suggested freezing the conflict and holding new referendums on the Ukrainian territories seized by Russia on the air of the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” talk show.
“And where people want to go, who they want to stay with, that’s who this territory stays with. Do we need territories that don’t want to live with us? I’m not sure about that, and for some reason it seems to me that the president doesn’t need them either. There is one catch: they (the Ukrainian authorities. – TMT) will never agree on this”, Simonyan said.
