Putin's TV Appearance Was Laced With Threat
Updated: 8:08pm UK, Tuesday 04 March 2014
By Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor
Laced with threat. Dripping with reason. Oozing confidence and with a fine comprehension of how to be frugal with the truth, Vladimir Putin sat slouched and held forth on Ukraine and his longstanding commitment to international law.
:: For the latest on the Ukraine crisis click here
On Kiev's new leadership, now recognised by the West - the products of a coup d'etat partly orchestrated with military training from Western mercenaries.
"We believe the coup d'etat was very meticulously planned and included some fighting units. We saw their work and their Western instructors did a very good job," the Russian president told a specially selected group of journalists during his first news conference in two weeks.
The Ukrainian opposition which deposed former leader Viktor Yanukovych, and is now the power in Kiev, has no legitimacy, he added.
On Russia's bloodless occupation of Crimea - he insisted that Russian troops had only reinforced their own locations after getting intelligence that nationalists were heading towards Crimea to cause trouble.
The men in Russian uniforms, driving Russian vehicles, carrying Russian weapons and speaking Russian, who have occupied government buildings, were not Russians, he said.
"A few days ago the group of armed men who occupied the parliament (in Crimea) were people who were concerned about security and they formed self-defence forces and took over government buildings," he insisted.
As he spoke, Ukrainian video footage showed Ukrainian air force officers confronting Russian commandos who have occupied the Belbek airbase just outside Sevastopol, the Ukrainian and Russian naval base.
Putin's confident nonsense concerning the deployment of his troops inside a sovereign nation was coupled with other, more problematic and technically true assertions.
Yanukovych was unpopular. He has employed known oligarchs and criminals coming from a tradition going back decades, fomented by successive Russian regimes of intense corruption. He had lost his way politically - and Ukrainians yearned for a change in the faces of their politicians.
Putin condemned the man he is now providing with sanctuary since he ran from office last week.
He insisted that Yanukovych was finished politically, but added that he should have been deposed at the ballot box. Yanukovych was, after all, elected, unlike the new government, which has received instantaneous backing from the West.
"I understand the people of the Maidan (Kiev's revolutionary centre), who demanded not just a slight refurbishment of the state but wanted a most serious change ... But this should have been done with elections," he said.
He said he would only intervene in Ukraine with military force to protect Russian-speaking citizens who looked to Moscow for their leadership and culture.
In other words, he served the new government in Kiev with an outright warning - and attempted to appeal to ordinary Ukrainians, insisting he would act only within the strictures of international law.
He established a "right of precedent" for intervention in the name of ethnic Russians in Georgia in 2008 when the international community did nothing to stop his invasion of South Ossetia.
But, as he observed, the West manipulated a "no-fly zone into a bombing campaign" in Libya and twisted United Nations Security Council resolutions to allow the use of force in Iraq.
Facing threats of economic sanctions, he almost smiled.
"They can be mutually damaging," he warned.
There will be little the West can do, he knows, to undermine such confidence.
:: Watch Sky News live on television, on Sky channel 501, Virgin Media channel 602, Freeview channel 82 and Freesat channel 202.
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