Russia not involved in conflict in Ukraine – Putin

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_06_05/Russia-not-involved-in-conflict-in-Ukraine-Putin-6343/

 

© Photo: RIA Novosti/Aleksey Nikolskyi

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the West has no reliable evidence of Russia’s involvement in the standoff between the Kiev authorities and independence supporters in eastern Ukraine, as Moscow has simply never had troops in the region.

“You know, it’s one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence. I will tell you again’s there are no armed forces and no Russian ‘instructors’ in southeastern Ukraine. And there never were any”, President Putin said in an interview with Radio Europe 1 and TF1 TV channel late on Wednesday.

Washington has recently claimed that the United States has proof that Russia intervened in the conflict, sent its troops and supplied weapons to self-defense militia in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine.

“Proof? Why don’t they show it? The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council,” the president stated, recalling that eventually US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the first place.

President Putin insisted that Russia has never tried to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Government must now sit down and talk with their own people instead of using weapons, tanks, planes and helicopters.

As for the second set of Western sanctions against Russia which took effect in April, Moscow was startled by the move. President Putin said that the measure defies logic as Russia has nothing to do with the current standoff between the Kiev regime and protesters in Ukraine’s southeast.

The President then speculated that the West’s forcible scenario to resolve the Ukrainian crisis failed to achieve its goals and they have started to look for a scapegoat.

Earlier on Wednesday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow will not allow the West to embroil Russia in a senseless confrontation or give the United States and NATO a chance to portray Moscow as their enemy, as Russia has no plans to establish anti-American and anti-Western formations.
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