Putin adviser offers new justification for 2022 invasion of Ukraine
A Kremlin adviser claims Russia merely beat Ukraine to launching an invasion planned for March 8, 2022, part of a long string of shifting justifications for the war.
Russian state news agency TASS has relayed a new Kremlin explanation for why Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin and executive secretary of the Eastern Economic Forum organizing committee, claimed that Ukraine itself had been planning to invade Russia on March 8, 2022 — and that Russia simply beat it to the punch by two weeks.
According to Kobyakov, this is supposedly confirmed by documents found by Russian soldiers at an abandoned headquarters of a Ukrainian territorial defense brigade at the start of the war. He framed the invasion in symbolic terms, saying Ukraine had intended to "gift a war" to Russia around International Women's Day, but instead received an invasion timed near a former shared military holiday.
Unexplained troop buildup
Kobyakov did not address why Russia had already begun massing troops and military equipment near Ukraine's border starting in spring 2021, moving hardware from as far as Siberia and the Far East, along with warships from the Pacific Ocean. He also repeated the claim that the West merely pretended to support the Minsk agreements while actually preparing Ukraine for war.
A history of shifting excuses
Over the years, Putin himself has cited a range of reasons for starting the war — from preventing NATO bases in Ukraine, to defending Russian-language rights, to opposing Ukraine's ambition to join the European Union. A similar tale about an imminent Ukrainian attack was told at the start of the war by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who claimed he could show on a map where an attack on Belarus was supposedly coming from — an attack he said was thwarted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That claim has since become a widely mocked internet meme.
