Putin Blames West for Ukraine War

 Russian forces stormed the Azovstal steel plant in Ukraine’s strategic port of Mariupol on Monday and stepped up missile strikes elsewhere, Ukrainian officials said, as President Vladimir Putin oversaw a parade of military firepower in Moscow.
Putin marked the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two by telling his armed forces they were fighting for their country.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his own Victory Day address, said his country would triumph over Russian forces.
Ukrainian officials said heavy fighting was underway in the country’s east, while four high-precision Onyx missiles fired from the Russian-controlled Crimea peninsula had struck the Odesa area in southwestern Ukraine. The governor of Mykolaiv, also in the southwest, said overnight strikes were very heavy.
Azovstal, a vast complex of buildings and underground tunnels, is the last holdout for Ukrainian troops in Mariupol, whose capture would help link Russian-seized areas in southern and eastern Ukraine and cut Ukraine off from the Azov Sea.
Putin has already declared victory in Mariupol but control of the steel plant would be a symbolic achievement on the 75th day of the war.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said Russian forces were now trying to advance in eastern Ukraine, where the situation was “difficult”, but had moved back from the city of Kharkiv, where a local official reported heavy Russian shelling.
Putin said Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine was a purely defensive and unavoidable measure against plans for a NATO-backed invasion of lands he said were historically Russia’s, including Crimea.
“Russia preventively rebuffed the aggressor,” he said.
In 2014, pro-Russian separatists seized parts of Donbas in eastern Ukraine and Russia annexed
Crimea from Ukraine the same year.
Putin casts the war as a battle against dangerous “Nazi”-inspired nationalists in Ukraine.
“All plans are being fulfilled. A result will be achieved – on that account there is no doubt,” Putin was quoted as saying after Monday’s parade.
Charles Michel, president of the European Council visited Odesa in the latest show of Western support, while Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejcinovic was in Kiev to discuss what Ukraine needed in more arms supplies.
In his speech at the parade, Putin again scolded the West for failing to heed Russian demands for security guarantees and a rollback to NATO’s expansion, arguing that it left Moscow no other choice but to launch an action in Ukraine.
The Russian leader emphasized that the Russian troops were fighting for the country’s security in Ukraine and called a minute of silence to honor the soldiers who fell in combat. Putin noted that some of the troops taking part in the parade previously have fought in Ukraine.
He said that the troops in Ukraine have been “fighting for the Motherland, so that no one will forget the lessons of World War II and there will be no place in the world for hangmen, executioners and the Nazis.”
The Victory Day that Russia marks on May 9 is the country’s most important holiday, celebrated with military parades and fireworks across the county.
The Soviet Union lost a staggering 27 million people in World War II, which it calls the Great Patriotic War. The conflict, which devastated the country and caused enormous suffering, has left a deep scar in the national psyche.