Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to continue the invasion of Ukraine until his country’s ‘noble’ aims are fulfilled, according to the BBC.
In his first comments on the conflict in more than a week, Putin said he had been left with no choice but to launch the invasion in a bid to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin claims that Ukraine has committed genocide against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, but there is no evidence to support this, the BBC reports.
It quoted Putin as saying: ‘On the one hand, we are helping and saving people, and on the other, we are simply taking measures to ensure the security of Russia itself.’
Putin was visiting a space facility in eastern Russia with Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko, one of his closest allies, to mark the 61st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space.
The BBC reports that, according to the United Nations, 10 million people have fled their homes since the invasion began.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted last week that the country had suffered ‘significant losses of troops’ since the conflict began.
While noting that neither Russian nor Ukrainian estimates of Russia’s losses can be independently verified (and that analysts have cautioned that Russia may be downplaying its casualty rate, while Ukraine could be inflating it to boost morale), the BBC says that Western leaders believe that between 7 000 and 15 000 Russian soldiers have been killed.
The Russian economy has also been rocked by a package of severe sanctions imposed by Western nations, yet Putin is quoted as saying that Russia did not ‘intend to be isolated’, arguing that it was ‘impossible to severely isolate anyone in the modern world – especially such a vast country as Russia’.