In 2014, Kyiv was doomed - ex-head of Ukrainian intelligence

In the spring of 2014, while Ukraine was looking for something to cover the sky above the Verkhovna Rada building in the center of Kyiv, Russia could quickly carry out an offensive operation and occupy its territory right up to the Dnieper.

The former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Viktor Gvozd, announced this on the air of the Apostrophe internet channel, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.

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According to Gvozd, Ukraine at that time did not have a single combat-ready military unit, and a hundred thousand strong Russian army was stationed on the border.

“MANPADS were installed to cover parliament, because they didn’t know how to cover Kyiv at that time. 14th year, end of February. It is now very easy to criticize how certain leaders behaved at that time; you can make complaints to them, and so on. But we need to take the conditions in which everything happened, the coordinate system that existed.

I remember how they sent cars back then and parked them on the runway in Gostomel, because they were afraid that Russian special forces would get in. Do you know that there was not a single combat unit from the eastern border to the Dnieper? Now everyone is telling us that back then they were collecting thread by thread, volunteers.

Thanks to the volunteers, we managed to save the situation in the first moments, thanks to the fact that our units held out for a month, and the Russians waited for the first shot to fire, for blood to be shed in Crimea, so that then, as they say, “the Belli incident”, so that the operation could begin.

And at that time, you know that a hundred thousand strong group was deployed along the border, just waiting to be able to cross. And they would have marched at that time, the month of March, to the Dnieper. At the beginning of March, I already had information that in the morning, at 6 am, at the General Staff of the Russian Federation, Putin signed a plan for the invasion of Ukraine. When they say that there was a lot of noise, that they would go, there was constant information - we constantly received information,” said Gvozd.