President Vladimir Putin issued a defiant message on his war in Ukraine, vowing to continue the faltering invasion until Russia has achieved its goals.
(Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin issued a defiant message on his war in Ukraine, vowing to continue the faltering invasion until Russia has achieved its goals.
“We will solve the set tasks step-by-step, carefully and consistently,” Putin told Russia’s parliament and top officials in Moscow on Tuesday. Russia was fighting for its “historic lands” in Ukraine, he said.
Putin gave his first state-of-the-nation address in nearly two years as his war in Ukraine nears the 12-month mark on Feb. 24. He spoke on the anniversary of his decision to recognize Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as independent, whose defense he used as the excuse to mount the full-scale invasion.
Having failed with initial plans to seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, within days, Russia’s military has suffered repeated defeats and massive casualties at the hands of Ukrainian forces backed by US and European weapons supplies. Putin gave his address a day after US President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv to underline continued American support for Ukraine.
As intense battles of attrition go on in eastern Ukrainian regions with neither side making much progress for months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy appealed at a security conference in Munich at the weekend for the US and its allies to speed up weapons deliveries to help counter a Russian spring offensive and allow his forces to take the initiative in the fight.
Putin has shrugged off rising Russian casualties. He called up 300,000 troops in a partial mobilization in September and has sought to convince Russians that his unprovoked attack on Ukraine is an existential struggle with the “collective West” for their country’s survival, repeatedly comparing it to the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II.
Putin has sought to steel Russians and the country’s economy for a long war.
While he said at the start of his invasion that “it is not our plan to occupy Ukrainian territory,” Putin signed an order declaring the annexation of four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine in September that his troops didn’t fully control. Ukraine wrested back control of part of that territory including the southern city of Kherson in November, the only regional capital Russian forces had occupied.
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