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Letters | Ukraine war: West will not thwart Russia’s pursuit of security
- Readers discuss the grounds for Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, the taxi industry’s grouses, taking a more innovative approach to helping smokers quit, and the need to hasten Hong Kong’s digital transformation.
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This November 21 marked the 10th anniversary of the tragic events at Maidan Square in Kyiv, which actually were the starting point for the current Ukrainian crisis. Just a few months later in February 2014, the democratically elected president was overthrown. Radical nationalists seized state power and began to impose an anti-Russian agenda on the entire country.
Ukraine’s Eastern regions, which have gravitated towards Russia, did not agree with this. But those who seized power unleashed a genuine terror against this part of the population.
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For a long time, Russia had tried to reason with Kyiv in the hope of building a national consensus that would suit various parts of the heterogeneous Ukrainian society, which could be reached by the Minsk agreements.
However, it turned out that the Ukrainian authorities and their Western patrons had other plans – they intensified their suppression of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population, implicitly preparing Ukraine for a war against Russia. The climax was reached in 2021, when the West began pumping our neighbouring country with weapons.
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Under these circumstances, Russia had no choice but to launch a special military operation in February 2022. By the end of March, it had actually achieved its main goals, while Kyiv appeared ready to conclude a political agreement that would be generally acceptable to both parties. In response, Russia withdrew some of its military forces from the Ukrainian capital as a gesture of goodwill.
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