Author: Al Jazeera
Published on: 20/02/2025 | 00:00:00

AI Summary:
US and Russian representatives held talks in Saudi Arabia this week. Later, Trump dismissed complaints that Ukrainian officials were not invited to participate. The notion that Kyiv “started it” led to outrage in Ukraine and from its allies. Russia’s attempt to blame Ukraine is part of a longstanding argument that does not stand up to scrutiny. What happened in February 2022 As people were sleeping, Russian troops and tanks rolled into Ukraine and missiles poured down in what US military analysts called the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. The attack followed weeks of Russian manoeuvres that included staging a large-scale military exercise along Russia’s border with Ukraine that the US estimated to include 190,000 Russian soldiers. PolitiFact recognised Putin’s lies justifying the Ukraine war as “our 2022 Lie of the Year” In 1990, Ukraine’s parliament declared its independence from the Soviet Union, a call it repeated in August 1991. In December 1991, Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence, and within days, the USSR dissolved. Putin set the table for the 2022 invasion with a 5,000-word essay in July 2021. In it, Putin argued that much of modern-day Ukraine occupies historically Russian lands. Putin’s essay blamed the conflict on the West, claiming the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was engineered from the outside. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev echoed Putin’s stance, saying Ukraine is a part of Russia, but “we live in different apartments” Soon after the war started, more than 140 scholars signed a letter denouncing Putin’s narrative as "factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism. Our ruling Trump said Zelenskyy “started” the war in Ukraine with Russia.

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