Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday presided over a ceremony at the Kremlin to annex four Ukrainian regions partly occupied by his forces. Below is the full text transcript of his speech, 30 September 2022, Kremlin:
Dear citizens of Russia, citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, deputies of the State Duma, and senators of the Russian Federation!
As you know, referendums took place in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Their results have been summed up, the results are known. People made their choice, a clear choice.
Today we are signing agreements on the admission of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic, the Zaporizhia Region and the Kherson Region to Russia. I am sure that the Federal Assembly will support the constitutional laws on the adoption and formation in Russia of four new regions, four new subjects of the Russian Federation, because this is the will of millions of people.
(Applause)
And this, of course, is their right, their inalienable right, which is enshrined in the first article of the UN Charter, which directly speaks of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
I repeat: this is an inalienable right of people, it is based on historical unity, in the name of which the generations of our ancestors won, those who from the origins of Ancient Russia for centuries created and defended Russia. Here, in Novorossia, Rumyantsev, Suvorov and Ushakov fought, Catherine II and Potemkin founded new cities. Here our grandfathers and great-grandfathers stood to death during the Great Patriotic War.
We will always remember the heroes of the “Russian spring”, those who did not come to terms with the neo-Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, all those who died for the right to speak their native language, preserve their culture, traditions, faith, for the right to live. These are the warriors of Donbass, the martyrs of the “Odessa Khatyn”, the victims of inhuman terrorist attacks staged by the Kyiv regime. These are volunteers and militias, these are civilians, children, women, old people, Russians, Ukrainians, people of various nationalities. This is the real people’s leader of Donetsk Alexander Zakharchenko, these are military commanders Arsen Pavlov and Vladimir Zhoga, Olga Kochura and Alexei Mozgovoy, this is the prosecutor of the Luhansk Republic Sergey Gorenko. This is paratrooper Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov and all our soldiers and officers who died the death of the brave during a special military operation. They are heroes. (Applause)
Heroes of Great Russia. And I ask you to honor their memory with a moment of silence.
(Moment of silence.)
Thank you.
Behind the choice of millions of residents in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions is our common destiny and a thousand-year history. This spiritual connection people passed on to their children and grandchildren. Despite all the trials, they carried through the years love for Russia. And no one can destroy this feeling in us. That is why both the older generations and the youth, those who were born after the tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, voted for our unity, for our common future.
In 1991, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, without asking the will of ordinary citizens, representatives of the then party elites decided to collapse the USSR, and people suddenly found themselves cut off from their homeland. This tore apart, dismembered our people’s community, turned into a national catastrophe. As once after the revolution the borders of the union republics were cut behind the scenes, so the last leaders of the Soviet Union, contrary to the direct expression of the will of the majority of people in the 1991 referendum, ruined our great country, simply confronted the peoples with a fact.
I admit that they did not even fully understand what they were doing and what consequences this would inevitably lead to in the end. But that doesn’t matter anymore. There is no Soviet Union, the past cannot be returned. Yes, and Russia today does not need it anymore, we are not striving for this. But there is nothing stronger than the determination of millions of people who, by their culture, faith, traditions, language, consider themselves part of Russia, whose ancestors lived in a single state for centuries. There is nothing stronger than the determination of these people to return to their true, historical Fatherland.
For a long eight years, people in the Donbass were subjected to genocide, shelling and blockade, and in Kherson and Zaporozhye they tried to criminally cultivate hatred for Russia, for everything Russian. Now, already during the referendums, the Kyiv regime threatened with violence, death to school teachers, women who worked in election commissions, intimidated millions of people who came to express their will with repressions. But the unbroken people of Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson had their say.
I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me, so that everyone remembers this: people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporozhye become our citizens forever. (Applause)
We call on the Kyiv regime to immediately cease fire, all hostilities, the war that it unleashed back in 2014, and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, it has been said more than once. But we will not discuss the choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson, it has been made, Russia will not betray it. (Applause)
And today’s Kiev authorities should treat this free will of the people with respect, and nothing else. This is the only way to peace.
We will protect our land with all the forces and means at our disposal and will do everything to ensure the safe life of our people. This is the great liberation mission of our people.
We will definitely rebuild destroyed cities and towns, housing, schools, hospitals, theaters and museums, restore and develop industrial enterprises, factories, infrastructure, social security, pensions, healthcare and education systems.
Of course, we will work to improve the security level. Together we will make sure that citizens in the new regions feel the support of the entire people of Russia, the entire country, all the republics, all territories and regions of our vast Motherland. (Applause)
Dear friends, colleagues!
Today I want to address the soldiers and officers who are participating in a special military operation, the soldiers of Donbass and Novorossia, those who, after the decree on partial mobilization, join the ranks of the Armed Forces, fulfilling their patriotic duty, who, at the call of their hearts, come to the military registration and enlistment offices. I would like to turn to their parents, wives, and children, to tell them what our people are fighting for, what enemy is opposing us, who is throwing the world into new wars and crises, deriving their bloody profit from this tragedy.
Our compatriots, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine – the native part of our united people – saw with their own eyes what the ruling circles of the so-called West are preparing for all mankind. Here they, in fact, just threw off their masks, showed their true insides.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West decided that the world, all of us, would forever have to put up with its dictates. Then, in 1991, the West expected that Russia would not recover from such shocks and would fall apart on its own. Yes, it almost happened – we remember the 90s, the terrible 90s, hungry, cold and hopeless. But Russia resisted, revived, strengthened, again took its rightful place in the world.
At the same time, the West has been looking all this time and continues to look for a new chance to hit us, weaken and destroy Russia, which they have always dreamed of, split our state, pit peoples against each other, doom them to poverty and extinction. They are simply haunted by the fact that there is such a great, huge country in the world with its territory, natural wealth, resources, with a people who do not know how and will never live according to someone else’s orders.
The West is ready to step over everything in order to preserve the neo-colonial system that allows it to parasitize, in fact, to plunder the world at the expense of the power of the dollar and technological dictates, to collect real tribute from humanity, to extract the main source of unearned prosperity, the rent of the hegemon. The maintenance of this rent is their key, genuine and absolutely self-serving motive. That is why total desovereignization is in their interests. Hence their aggression towards independent states, towards traditional values and original cultures, attempts to undermine international and integration processes beyond their control, new world currencies and centers of technological development. It is critical for them that all countries surrender their sovereignty to the United States.
The ruling elites of some states voluntarily agree to do this, voluntarily agree to become vassals; others are bribed, intimidated. And if it doesn’t work out, they destroy entire states, leaving behind humanitarian catastrophes, disasters, ruins, millions of ruined, mangled human destinies, terrorist enclaves, social disaster zones, protectorates, colonies and semi-colonies. They don’t care as long as they get their own benefit.
I want to emphasize once again: it is precisely in greed, in the intention to maintain its unlimited power, that there are the real reasons for the hybrid war that the “collective West” is waging against Russia. They do not wish us freedom, but they want to see us as a colony. They do not want equal cooperation, but robbery. They want to see us not as a free society, but as a crowd of soulless slaves.
For them, a direct threat is our thought and philosophy, and therefore they encroach on our philosophers. Our culture and art are a danger to them, so they are trying to ban them. Our development and prosperity is also a threat to them – competition is growing. They don’t need Russia at all, we need it. (Applause)
I want to remind you that the claims to world domination in the past have been shattered more than once by the courage and steadfastness of our people. Russia will always be Russia. We will continue to defend both our values and our Motherland.
The West is counting on impunity, on getting away with everything. In fact, everything has gotten away with it so far. Agreements in the field of strategic security go to the wastebasket; agreements reached at the highest political level are declared false; firm promises not to expand NATO to the east, as soon as our former leaders bought into them, turned into a dirty deceit; treaties on anti-missile defense and intermediate- and shorter-range missiles have been unilaterally broken under far-fetched pretexts.
All we hear from all sides is that the West stands for order based on rules. Where did they come from? Who even saw these rules? Who agreed? Listen, this is just some kind of nonsense, sheer deception, double or already triple standards! It’s just designed for fools.
Russia is a great millennial power, a country-civilization, and will not live by such rigged, false rules. (Applause)
It is the so-called West that has trampled on the principle of the inviolability of borders, and now, at its own discretion, decides who has the right to self-determination and who does not, who is not worthy of it. Why they decide so, who gave them such a right is not clear. To themselves.
That is why the choice of people in the Crimea, in Sevastopol, in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson causes wild anger in them. This West has no moral right to evaluate it, even to stutter about the freedom of democracy. No, and never was!
Western elites deny not only national sovereignty and international law. Their hegemony has a pronounced character of totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid. They brazenly divide the world into their vassals, into the so-called civilized countries and into all the rest, who, according to the plan of today’s Western racists, should add to the list of barbarians and savages. False labels – “rogue country”, “authoritarian regime” – are already ready, they stigmatize entire peoples and states, and there is nothing new in this. There is nothing new in this: the Western elites are what they were, and have remained so – colonialist. They discriminate, divide peoples into the first and other grades.
We have never accepted and will never accept such political nationalism and racism. And what, if not racism, is Russophobia, which is now spreading all over the world? What, if not racism, is the peremptory conviction of the West that its civilization, neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the whole world? “He who is not with us is against us.” It even sounds strange.
Even the repentance for their own historical crimes is being shifted by the Western elites to everyone else, demanding both the citizens of their countries and other peoples to confess for what they have nothing to do with at all, for example, for the period of colonial conquests.
It is worth reminding the West that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, and then followed the global slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India, Africa, the wars of England and France against China, as a result of which it was forced to open its ports for trade opium. What they did was put entire nations on drugs, purposefully exterminated entire ethnic groups for the sake of land and resources, staged a real hunt for people like animals. This is contrary to the very nature of man, truth, freedom and justice.
And we – we are proud that in the 20th century it was our country that led the anti-colonial movement, which opened up opportunities for many peoples of the world to develop in order to reduce poverty and inequality, to overcome hunger and disease.
(Part 1)...