INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday (April 12) peace talks with Ukraine had hit a dead end, using his first public comments on the
conflict in more than a week to vow that his troops would win and to goad the West for failing to bring Moscow to heel.Addressing the war in
public for the first time since Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine after they were halted at the gates of Kyiv, Putin promised
that Russia would achieve all of its &noble& aims in Ukraine.In the strongest signal to date that the war will grind on for longer, Putin
said Kyiv had derailed peace talks by staging what he said were fake claims of Russian war crimes and by demanding security guarantees to
cover the whole of Ukraine.&We have again returned to a dead-end situation for us,& Putin, Russia&s paramount leader since 1999, told a news
briefing during a visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow.Putin said Russia had no choice but to fight
because it had to defend the Russian speakers of eastern Ukraine and prevent its former Soviet neighbour from becoming an anti-Russian
springboard for Moscow&s enemies.The West has condemned the war as a brutal imperial-style land grab targeting a sovereign country
Ukraine says it is fighting for its survival after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and on Feb
21 recognised two of its rebel regions as sovereign.Putin, who had been ubiquitous on Russian television in the early days of the war, had
largely retreated from public view since Russia&s withdrawal from northern Ukraine two weeks ago.Putin dismissed Ukrainian and Western
claims that Russia had committed war crimes as fakes.Since Russian troops withdrew from towns and villages around the Ukrainian capital
Kyiv, Ukrainian troops have been showing journalists corpses of what they say are civilians killed by Russian forces, destroyed houses and
burnt-out cars.Reuters saw dead bodies in the town of Bucha but could not independently verify who was responsible for the killings
Ukraine says Russia is guilty of genocide and U.S
President Joe Biden has accused Putin of war crimes and called for a trial.Putin said he had told Western leaders to think a little about
destruction by the United States of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the Islamic State caliphate, and in
Afghanistan.&There was no such silence when provocations were staged in Syria, when they portrayed the use of chemical weapons by the Assad
Then it turned out that it was fake
It&s the same kind of fake in Bucha.&Putin, who says Ukraine and Russia are essentially one people, casts the war as an inevitable
confrontation with the United States, which he accuses of threatening Russia by meddling in its backyard.The post Putin calls situation in
Ukrainian town of Bucha ‘fake& first appeared on Ariana News.
