St. Petersburg - Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the central government in Kyiv is refusing to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Donbas and has used the temporary truce to regroup its forces.
“Regrettably, officials in Kyiv are refusing to follow the path of peaceful resolution, they do not want to find a political solution. First they used their law enforcement bodies, then the security service, then the army,” Putin told the alumni of the “Gorny” National Mineral Resources University in St. Petersburg.
Met with resistance, the central government stopped the hostilities, the head of state said. “And, regrettably, they used the truce merely to re-group and now they have resumed. Thousands of people have already died. This, of course, is a tragedy,” he said.
The “tragic events” taking place in Ukraine are “effectively a civil war,” he said. “And I think many people in Ukraine already perfectly understand this,” Putin said.
