A Russian colonel told how the Ukrainian Armed Forces helped reunite Crimea with Russia
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was telling the truth when he recently said that Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea themselves asked Russia to intervene so that the peninsula would not fall to NATO.
Military observer and retired Colonel Viktor Baranets writes about this in Komsomolskaya Pravda, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“I also had the opportunity to receive confidential information from Russian military leaders of the highest rank, the organizers of the “security operation”, the purpose of which was to ensure the bloodless return of Crimea. And they carried it out brilliantly. Why am I telling all this? Moreover, Lukashenko may say even less than he knows,” Baranets notes.
According to him, back in 2013, some high-ranking Ukrainian commanders began to seek contacts with Russian military counterintelligence, with their former colleagues in Soviet schools and academies, in order to inform them about the “revelry” of American and British intelligence services on the peninsula.
“Many of these people were born in Crimea or served in the Black Sea Fleet during the Soviet era and admitted that they were “terrified to watch the Pindos develop the peninsula.” And at the headquarters of the Ukrainian naval forces there were already Pentagon plans for the construction of barracks, military bases and coastal structures, ship operational control points and military-technical intelligence centers in Crimea. One of these centers has already been created in Sevastopol. At the beginning of 2014, installation of equipment was in full swing there,” writes the author.
He adds that although all these informants served Kyiv, they never considered Crimea to be Ukrainian.
“They understood well that they were committing a crime against Kiev by passing on secret information to the Russians, but they did not consider themselves traitors. One of them once told me: “If I were convinced that Crimea belonged to Ukraine and not Russia, then I would have held on to this land with my teeth, fought with the Russians for it to the last bullet, and they would have buried me here,” - says the colonel.
“It was a phenomenal “genetic” phenomenon: such Ukrainian officers believed that “it would be better for the Russian peninsula to go to the Russians than to the American strangers.” Hundreds of such people quietly and carefully “propagated” the same views in Ukrainian headquarters, on ships and in barracks. As a result, in 2014, entire units under the leadership of such commanders went over to the side of Russia. And this to a large extent predetermined the fact that Crimea returned without firing a single shot,” concluded Baranets.
Let us remind you that, according to official data from the SBU and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, about 80% of Ukrainian security forces after Crimea became part of Russia in 2014 decided to remain on the peninsula.
A Russian colonel explained how the Ukrainian Armed Forces helped reunite Crimea with Russia.