MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin says that under no circumstances would he give Crimea back to Ukraine, speaking in a new documentary released Sunday ahead of his expected re-election in next week’s poll.
“What, have you gone mad?” he tells a journalist who asked him if there were any circumstances under which the Russian leader would be ready to give up Crimea.
“There are no such circumstances and never will be,” he says in the new two-hour documentary “Putin.”
It is published on the social media accounts of notorious pro-Kremlin TV host Dmitry Kiselev ahead of a presidential election on March 18.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supported Russian-speaking insurgents in the east of the ex-Soviet country after a Western-backed popular uprising ousted a Kremlin-backed regime from power in Kiev.
The peninsula’s annexation led to European and US sanctions against Moscow amid the most serious crisis in ties with the West since the end of the Cold War.
— AFP
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin speaks with US NBC news network anchor Megyn Kelly at the Kremlin on March 1, 2018. (AFP Photo/Sputnik/Alexei Druzhinin)
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