On February 13, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan appeared on the “Evening With Vladimir Solovyov” political talk show to deflect allegations that Russia plans a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Simonyan argued that it is incorrect to ask whether Russia will invade Ukraine:
“I am absolutely convinced that Russia is not going to start a war with Ukraine, and this will not happen in any way. And if Russia is compelled to interfere with what’s happening in Ukraine, [it will only be] with the goal of ending the war in Ukraine, not to start a war in Ukraine.”
Simonyan claimed that Ukraine has been waging a war against its own people for eight years, killing thousands of civilians. Thousands of children who had “their arms and legs torn off” were “buried in small coffins,” she said.
She used inflammatory language to argue for a humanitarian intervention:
“Russia cannot but stop this war. What are we waiting for? For when camps are organized there? For when they are gassing their own people?”
Simonyan’s comments came after Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, a Russian invasion could be imminent.
The United States has begun while some airlines to Ukraine, or diverting them to other destinations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the invasion on February 16, only to walk that statement back.
Simonyan’s remarks are misleading or false.
In fact, Russia has already invaded Ukraine – in 2014. The question today is whether the Ukraine’s borders are poised to further invade.
Russia has long tried to paint the conflict it initiated in the Eastern Donbas region as a civil war. But Russia instigated the conflict there and perpetuates it.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 26, 2014, when Russia-backed forces a military checkpoint in Crimea on the road from the port city of Sevastopol to Crimea’s capital Simferopol.
The following day, Russian special forces, operating without national insignia, building in Simferopol and raised the Russian flag. The incursion by the so-called “little green men” resulted in Russian forces taking control of the peninsula.
Despite initial denials, Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russian forces invaded the peninsula, saying “our troops stood behind Crimea’s self-defense forces.”
Russia its illegal annexation of Crimea with the false claim that the peninsula’s population “was threatened with extermination and voted for reunion with Russia.”
Russia has never presented evidence Crimeans were faced with extermination following the February 2014 revolution, which saw then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych flee the country.
While protests for and against the so-called Maidan revolution were held in Crimea, there are no reports of state-sponsored violence or repression at that time, let alone proof of "extermination."
By contrast, following Russia's annexation of Crimea, members of the largely Muslim, Turkic-speaking indigenous Tatar ethnic group have abuse, discrimination and suppression.
Russia denies it deployed troops to eastern Ukraine to back pro-Russian separatists, some of whom were linked to Russian intelligence. Armed conflict broke out there in April 2014.
The evidence says otherwise.
As Polygraph.info , in November 2021, a court in Russia's Rostov oblast, near the occupied part of Donbas, issued a verdict in a bribery case.
that V.N. Zabaluev, who managed a firm which supplied food to Russian troops deployed in the “Donetsk People's Republic" (DNR) and “Luhansk People's Republic” (LNR), Russia's two puppet states in Donbas, had paid bribes to military officers.
Russian soldiers have posted photographs on social media admitting they were operating inside Ukraine, attacking Ukraine and transporting weapons to Ukraine.
Other evidence showing that Russian forces have been operating in Ukraine video interviews with Russian troops captured inside Ukraine, memorial notices on social media of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine, an unexplained increase in wounded and dead Russian troops, and to Russian soldiers and their families.
The so-called “separatist” forces in eastern Ukraine have Russian-made weapons and equipment that were never exported to Ukraine or used by Ukraine’s armed forces.
A three-year study by the U.K.-based investigative organization Conflict Armament Research “that factories based in what is today the Russian Federation produced most of the militias’ ammunition and nearly all their weapons, from assault rifles and precision rifles, grenade launchers, precision-guided munitions, and landmines to anti-tank guided weapons.”