President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Tuesday that the “main goal” of the war in Ukraine was “to help people” in the country’s east, the latest sign that Russia is focused on the battle for the Donbas region as the next stage of the war.
Putin, visiting a spaceport in the Russian Far East along with President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, his close ally, told workers at the facility in televised remarks that “there is no doubt” that the war will be successful. In his first extended comments about the course of the war since last month, Putin defended his decision to invade but did not say that the operation was going “according to plan” — a departure from his rhetoric in the first weeks of the war.
“What we are doing is helping people and saving people, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we are simply taking measures to ensure the security of Russia itself,” Putin said. “It is obvious that we had no other choice.”
Putin was touring the Vostochny spaceport with Lukashenko on the occasion of Cosmonauts’ Day, marking the anniversary of the first human spaceflight, by the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in 1961.
The visit appeared calculated to show Russians that their country would still be capable of innovating despite Western sanctions, with Putin telling spaceport workers that the Soviet Union had achieved “grandiose successes” in space technology despite its “total technological isolation.” He said Russia would move ahead with its lunar program, which includes a lunar lander scheduled to be launched this year.
“We are not going to isolate ourselves, and it is generally impossible to isolate anyone in the modern world, and most certainly not as huge a country as Russia,” Putin said.
A spaceport worker was shown telling Putin that he wanted the “goals and tasks” of what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” to be fulfilled. The president responded that they would be, and then volunteered that the operation was focused on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian and Western officials have said in recent days that they expect Russia to launch a large-scale assault on Ukrainian troops in that region soon.
“I said it from the very beginning,” Putin said. “The main goal is to help people in the Donbas.”
He then reprised his claims that the West had fostered “neo-Nazism” in Ukraine to turn the country into an “anti-Russian bridgehead.” It was an echo of the latest messaging on Russian state television, which has explained Ukraine’s fierce resistance to the Russian invasion by falsely claiming that “Nazism” had permeated Ukrainian society.
“A collision with these forces was unavoidable for Russia — they were just choosing the time for an attack,” Putin said. “Subsequent events showed how deeply this had grown there. This neo-Nazism unfortunately became a fact of life for a rather large country close to us.”
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