Obama: ‘Merkel and I Pressured Europe to Impose Sanctions Against Russia’

Former US President Barack Obama stated in an interview with CNN that it was only thanks to him, during his time in the White House, and to Angela Merkel as German Chancellor, that Ukraine was able to prepare for war against Russia, a confession that confirms once again that the Minsk Agreements were a strategy to give Kiev time to strengthen itself.

Until last year, when Merkel admitted it publicly, no official in North America or Europe had confirmed it. Now, with Obama’s admission, it is even clearer that there was a plan to arm the Ukrainian army and far-right neo-Nazi groups to confront Russia.

Obama declara a la CNN que sólo gracias a él y a Merkel, Ucrania pudo prepararse para la guerra contra Rusia.
"Creo que la Ucrania de entonces no es la de hoy".
"Merkel y yo, a quien rindo un gran homenaje, tuvimos que implicar a muchos otros europeos, presionándoles mucho para… pic.twitter.com/CzW2gEDqvL
— El Viejo Topo (@Viejo_Topo) June 23, 2023

“Merkel and I, to whom I pay great tribute, had to involve many other Europeans, putting a lot of pressure on them to impose the sanctions we imposed. And to stop Putin from crossing the Donbas into the other part of Ukraine,” he said.

“I think the Ukraine of then is not the Ukraine of today,” Obama noted, saying that “part of what happened over time was the emergence of a Ukrainian identity, the desire to fight Russia, the opportunity to prepare militarily to resist pressure. We pumped up their muscles, and this allowed them to fight back.”

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What Obama said is almost a copy of what Merkel expressed last year:

“The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As the battle for Debaltsevo [a major railway junction in the Donetsk People’s Republic] in early 2015 showed, Putin could easily have invaded it then. And I doubt very much that NATO states could have done as much then as they are doing now to help Ukraine,” he said, arguing that this drag-out was “valuable” for Kiev.

Both Obama’s and Merkel’s confessions make it clear that in the Normandy quartet, where the Minsk Agreements were established with the aim of ending the escalation of violence in the Donbass, there was no real interest in ending the war. On the contrary, Kiev’s hostilities against the Russian-speaking population continued until Russia deployed the special military operation in February 2022.

(Misión Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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