Have you ever seen Russia waging colonial wars or wars to expand its territory? [...] The Russians do not want to invade anyone. The only reason they wage war is to ensure the security of their borders. That is why Putin has moved his army into Ukraine, because since 1998 NATO military activities have been taking place there that threaten Russia's borders. It is idiotic to say that Putin wants to invade Poland and the Baltics. Putin wants to take it easy, he does not want to have a gun pointed at his face by NATO.

We firmly know that the peoples of Russia and Ukraine do not want a war. Such a war would also run counter to the fundamental interests of Europe. But the ruling powers of the United States appear to want it.

The Russian Defense Ministry is trying to deceive the President and the public and tell them there was insane aggression on the part of Ukraine and they were going to attack us together with the entire NATO bloc. So, the so-called "special operation" on February 24 was launched for completely different reasons. Why was the war needed? The war was needed so that a handful of scumbags could have a blast and get PR attention showing how strong the army is … The war was not started … in order to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, I told the Senate that expansion would lead us to where we are today... Today we face an avoidable crisis between the United States and Russia that was predictable, willfully precipitated, but can easily be resolved by the application of common sense. But how did we get to this point? Allow me, as someone who participated in the negotiations that ended the Cold War, to bring some history to bear on the current crisis. We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members.

Why is there this constant talk of war? It's as if [the West] really wants us to destroy this unfortunate Ukraine. In Russia there is no war hysteria. We do have an anti-war movement, but we have no pro-war movement. It's surprising. The Americans say 'no, you must invade. We know it for a fact.'

Can the crisis be resolved by the application of common sense? Yes, after all, what Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence — the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions” — was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russo-phobic stance that it will take great political skill to navigate such treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome. President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? Maybe the subsequent negotiations between Washington and the Kremlin will find a way to allay Russian concerns and defuse the crisis. And maybe then Congress will start dealing with the growing problems we have at home instead of making them worse.

Today I initiated a phone call with the president of the Russian federation. The result was silence. Though the silence should be in Donbass. That's why I want to address today the people of Russia. I am addressing you not as a president, I am addressing you as a citizen of Ukraine. More than 2,000 km of the common border is dividing us (between Ukraine and Russia). Along this border your troops are stationed, almost 200,000 soldiers, thousands of military vehicles. Your leaders approved them to make a step forward, to the territory of another country (Ukraine). And this step can be the beginning of a big war on European continent. We know for sure that we don't need the war. Not a Cold War, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one. But if we'll be attacked by the troops, if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Not attack, but defend ourselves. And when you will be attacking us, you will see our faces, not our backs, but our faces. The war is a big disaster, and this disaster has a high price. With every meaning of this word. People lose money, reputation, quality of life, they lose freedom. But the main thing is that people lose their loved ones, they lose themselves. They told you that Ukraine is posing a threat to Russia. It was not the case in the past, not in the present, it's not going to be in the future. You are demanding security guarantees from NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization), but we also demand security guarantees. Security for Ukraine from you, from Russia and other guarantees of the Budapest memorandum. But our main goal is peace in Ukraine and the safety of our people, Ukrainians. For that we are ready to have talks with anybody, including you, in any format, on any platform. The war will deprive (security) guarantees from everybody — nobody will have guarantees of security anymore. Who will suffer the most from it? The people. Who doesn't want it the most? The people! Who can stop it? The people. But are there those people among you? I am sure. I know that they (Russian government) won't show my address on Russian TV, but Russian people have to see it. They need to know the truth, and the truth is that it is time to stop now, before it is too late. And if the Russian leaders don't want to sit with us behind the table for the sake of peace, maybe they will sit behind the table with you. Do Russians want the war? I would like to know the answer. But the answer depends only on you, citizens of the Russian Federation.

The cost that Ukraine has had to bear has been extraordinarily high, and the sacrifices have been far too great. They’ve been met, but they’ve been far too great. We mourn alongside the families of those who have been lost to the brutal and unjust war. We know that there’ll be very difficult days and weeks and years ahead. But Russia’s aim was to wipe Ukraine off the map. Putin’s war of conquest is failing. Russia’s military has lost half its territory it once occupied. Young, talented Russians are fleeing by the tens of thousands, not wanting to come back to Russia. Not … just fleeing from the military, fleeing from Russia itself, because they see no future in their country. Russia’s economy is now a backwater, isolated and struggling. Putin thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. As you know, Mr. President, I said to you at the beginning, he’s counting on us not sticking together. He was counting on the inability to keep NATO united. He was counting on us not to be able to bring in others on the side of Ukraine. He thought he could outlast us. I don’t think he’s thinking that right now.

The problem of the danger of war depends on whether the USSR is inclined to fight against the United States in my region. I can assure you that that country does not want war either.

The inevitable has happened. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It was inevitable because the US and its NATO partners had backed Russia into a corner from which it could only escape by military means. In effect, Russia confronted a future in which the US would increasingly tighten the noose around its neck by further eastward expansion of NATO, combined with military upgrading by the US of its Eastern European NATO proxies. Accompanying that militarization was the prospect of a ramped-up propaganda war in which western media fanned the flames of public animus against Russia. Side-by-side, US government financed entities (such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the German Marshall Fund) would seek to influence European and Russian politics with the goal of regime change. At this stage, there are two questions. What will be done? And what should be done?

It is, they say, not Russia that plans aggression but, on the contrary, the decaying capitalist democracies. Russia wants merely to defend its own independence. This is an old and well-tried method of justifying aggression. Louis XIV and Napoleon I, Wilhelm II and Hitler were the most peace-loving of all men. When they invaded foreign countries, they did so only in just self-defence. Russia was as much menaced by Estonia or Latvia as Germany was by Luxemburg or Denmark.

Russians don’t wage war. We’re trying to preserve infrastructure and human lives.

The Russian people are themselves asking how many lives Putin will sacrifice for his cynical ambitions. And they are appalled at the answer. To the Russian protesters, I say thank you – thank you – for your bravery. To the Russian soldiers sent to the front lines of an unjust, unnecessary war, I say: your leaders are lying to you. Do not commit war crimes. Do everything you can to put down your weapons and leave Ukraine. The truth is that this war was one man’s choice and one man alone: President Putin. It was his choice to force hundreds of thousands of people to stuff their lives into backpacks and flee the country. To send newborn babies into makeshift bomb shelters. To make children with cancer huddle in hospital basements, interrupting their treatment, essentially sentencing them to death. Those were President Putin’s choices. Now it’s time for us to make ours.

Because I had seen our best efforts to forestall a violent choice by Putin fail in ’14, I was more prepared than many... Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., ...that he would actually take this step. The fact that we found the [Russian war] plans when we did — and they were as robust as they were... gave us the time that we needed to prepare. A lot of us were veterans of 2014, ’15 and ’16, and felt that if we had done more faster then to help Ukraine, we might have had a better result... The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed... We were preparing for many scenarios in which the Ukrainians essentially had to get Kyiv back...We didn’t know which scenario we were going to be looking at... There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen... None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days... All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist... we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive.