Vladimir Putin delivered his Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly in Gostiny Dvor, Moscow.
“This Presidential Address comes, as we all know, at a difficult, watershed period for our country. This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine the future of our country and our people, a time when every one of us bears a colossal responsibility.
One year ago, to protect the people in our historical lands, to ensure the security of our country and to eliminate the threat coming from the neo-Nazi regime that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup, it was decided to begin the special military operation.
Step by step, carefully and consistently we will deal with the tasks we have at hand. Since 2014, Donbass has been fighting for the right to live in their land and to speak their native tongue. It fought and never gave up amid the blockade, constant shelling and the Kiev regime’s overt hatred. It hoped and waited that Russia would come to help.
In the meantime, as you know well, we were doing everything in our power to solve this problem by peaceful means, and patiently conducted talks on a peaceful solution to this devastating conflict.
This appalling method of deception has been tried and tested many times before. They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honor, trust, and decency are not for them.
Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat, and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.
We firmly defend our interests as well as our belief that in today’s world there should be no division into so-called civilized countries and all the rest and that there is a need for an honest partnership that rejects any exclusivity, especially an aggressive one.
We were open and sincerely ready for a constructive dialogue with the West; we said and insisted that both Europe and the whole world needed an indivisible security system equal for all countries, and for many years we suggested that our partners discuss this idea together and work on its implementation. But in response, we received either an indistinct or hypocritical reaction, as far as words were concerned.
But there were also actions: NATO’s expansion to our borders, the creation of new deployment areas for missile defense in Europe and Asia – they decided to take cover from us under an ‘umbrella’ – deployment of military contingents, and not just near Russia’s borders.
I would like to stress –in fact, this is well-known – that no other country has so many military bases abroad as the United States. There are hundreds of them – I want to emphasize this – hundreds of bases all over the world; the planet is covered with them, and one look at the map is enough to see this.
The whole world witnessed how they withdrew from fundamental agreements on weapons, including the treaty on intermediate and shorter-range missiles, unilaterally tearing up the fundamental agreements that maintain world peace. For some reason, they did it.
They do not do anything without a reason, as we know. Finally, in December 2021, we officially submitted draft agreements on security guarantees to the U.S.A. and NATO. In essence, all key, fundamental points were rejected. After that it finally became clear that the go-ahead for the implementation of aggressive plans had been given and they were not going to stop". -Vladimir Putin, Address to the Federal Assembly
The western corporate media’s coverage of Putin’s address has been predictably unreliable, given that outlets were quoting the responses to the speech before its released.
While the address may have come short of an outright announcement of the launch of another anticipated Russian military offensive, the speech highlighted the abject failure of western sanctions on Russia, as well as the New START nuclear treaty.
And, as Putin stated that Kiev and its NATO backers had initiated the conflict in Ukraine, the president assured his nation’s legislators that the Russian military would use sufficient force to put it to an end.