Maybe, but that would be difficult, since Russia claims that Ukraine has an illegal Regime of genocidal nazis.
But this is part of their propaganda.That Ukraine has an illegal nazi regime that they have a responsibility to remove root and stem, by force of arms.
After recounting a politicized history emphasizing Crimea’s ties to Russia, Putin argued that Russia was forced to intervene on humanitarian grounds. He claimed the new government “wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder, and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites executed this coup.” In response, “the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives.”
After invoking the “well-known Kosovo precedent” to justify Crimea’s engineered referendum to join Russia, Putin then moved on to articulate his resentment toward the West for its hypocrisy and neglect of Russia’s interests. Whereas “Russia strived to engage in dialogue” with the West, “we saw no reciprocal steps. On the contrary, they have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.”
Then later in 2021, this became the message:
Putin then reverted to a familiar pretext, “genocide against the millions of people living [in the Donbas] who rely only on Russia, only on us.” The aggressors were the Ukrainian government comprised of “extreme nationalists and Neo-Nazis,” similar to “gangs of Ukrainian nationalists, Hitler’s accomplices” during World War II. Yet they were a threat not only to Russians in Ukraine: “Russia’s clash with these forces is inevitable. It is only a matter of time: they are getting ready, they are waiting for the right time. Now they also claim to acquire nuclear weapons.” This triumvirate of existential threats, alliterative in English—NATO, Nazis, and nukes—paved the way for Putin’s pursuit of “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”
Illegal nazis with nukes and biolabs etc. And NATO ladida.
So hard to climb down and negotiate with Zelensky.
