Remember, Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation in February; killed more than 70,000 members of the Ukrainian military, and, according to the UN, left 10,000 Ukrainian civilians dead.
But the way Putin tells it, the war was a so-called “special military operation” was necessary to sort out corruption to conduct a “denazification” in Ukraine. And according to the Russian president, he would have stopped the war by now were it not for “Western countries” meddling in the peace process.