The Sunday Mail
Senior Reporter
RUSSIA has defended its military operation in Ukraine saying the difficult decision was taken to protect its citizens and those of Russian heritage living in Ukraine.
This was said by Russia’s chief envoy to South Africa Ambassador Ilya Rogachev during a Friday panel discussion chaired by former Zimbabwe Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara on the contentious global issue.
In the dialogue, which was facilitated by the Institute for the Future of Knowledge at the University of Johannesburg Rogachev said they tried to engage Ukraine, the United States and NATO member states for close to two decades but their pleas were not acted upon despite multiple promises.
Speaking on what triggered the military operation, he said: “I can invoke a number of other reasons that the Russian minority in Ukraine suffered some repression and there were laws adopted prohibiting Russian language, culture, pop music, music, media. Everything was prohibited,” he said. Ambassador Rogachev said they tried on multiple occasions to reason with NATO and Ukraine but the two parties refused to listen to Russian concerns.
“The other reasons are security issues in Europe. There are issues of strategic security that we tried to discuss many times with our Western, as we used to call them, partners. In particular the issue of NATO expansion. Ukraine was striving to become a NATO member and for 30 years NATO infrastructure has been moving towards Russia and we consider it a direct threat to Russian security. On numerous occasions for almost two decades, we spoke to Ukraine and NATO countries but there was wave after wave of NATO expansion despite the promise not to expand the eastwards block made to the Soviet leadership in the early 1990s,” said Ambassador Rogachev.
He claimed that NATO was on the verge of base installations in Ukraine when they began their military operation. “We tried to solve this issue diplomatically, by presenting our two draft treaties on mutual security guarantees separately to the United States and to NATO on December 15 last year.
‘‘We received a NO, which was full of contempt, denial of any possibility for the Russian federation to have any security reasons and they could be somehow taken into account.”
This week will mark a month since Russia ventured into Ukraine under the military operation. Western countries reacted to the move by slapping sanctions on Russia, and this has seen the disruption of value chains.
In Zimbabwe, fuel and bread prices have gone up as a result.
