From the very first moment, the KKE has pointed out the imperialist character of the war in Ukraine, which is being waged by bourgeois classes in the framework of monopoly capitalism, driven by the capitalists' thirst for profits.

Ukraine is a real treasure for capital, due to its important mineral wealth and large areas of arable land, developed technological infrastructure (12 thermal power plants, 6 hydroelectric power plants, 5 nuclear power plants, 6 major oil pipelines, a huge network of tens of kilometres of pipelines for transporting Russian gas to European countries, 8 refineries), tens of large industrial plants, such as wood and metal processing plants, food production plants, chemical industry, defence industry and shipyards, along with a large workforce. All the above, in addition to its geostrategic position, especially its access to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, turn it into a modern "apple of discord" between the imperialists of the Euro-Atlantic bloc (USA, NATO, EU) on the one hand and capitalist Russia and the emerging Eurasian bloc led by China on the other.

The correct assessment of the character of the war as imperialist and the class-oriented approach that reveals the anti-people nature of those class forces that are waging this war on both sides has by no way prevented the KKE from organizing struggles against NATO, of which Greece is an active member. The same applies to the KKE’s struggle against the US, with which the bourgeois right-wing, left-wing and centre governments have signed a "strategic Agreement" (Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement) as well as to the struggle against the involvement of our country in the war.

Since the outbreak of the war, the KKE has scoured Greece, organizing hundreds of anti-war and anti-imperialist events: mass mobilizations at US bases, ports and airports of strategic importance for the Euro-Atlantic arms supply, such as the port of Alexandroupolis, as well as symbolic blockades of NATO forces, condemning the imperialist war and demanding an end to Greece's participation in the adventurist plans of the Euro-Atlantic imperialism in Ukraine. The KKE voted against the support of the reactionary Zelenskiy government with arms and money both in the Greek and the European parliament; even when he delivered a speech in the Greek parliament the KKE parliamentary group was the only one that collectively refused to participate.

The KKE informed the people about the causes of the war, rejecting the pretexts used by both sides, and called upon the people not to choose a camp between imperialists, as, unfortunately, was the case with some CPs, who accepted these false pretexts and created new ones in the name of "anti-imperialism".

Regardless of the developments in the military conflict, we believe that there is still a need to focus on unmasking the real reasons of the imperialist war in the ranks of the international communist movement, and this is the purpose of this article.

This is a key argument, which V. Putin used in his speech announcing the military operation in Ukraine. [1] The truth, however, is that bourgeois Russia's relations with NATO began earlier. The Russian bourgeoisie was grateful to the US and NATO, which in every way supported the restoration of capitalism in Russia. The infamous Boris Yeltsin, in 1992, speaking to the US Congress, vowed that together they would manage to "bury the idol of communism once and for all" and concluded his speech by wishing "God bless America". [2] Meanwhile, capitalist Russia joined the so-called "Partnership for Peace", the "NATO-Russia" Council was established, ambassadors were exchanged, the one country invited the other to military exercises, Russia supported the US intervention in Afghanistan and, as V. Putin revealed, even a year after NATO bombed Yugoslavia, Russia was looking forward to joining it. [3]

It is characteristic that the Russian bourgeoisie was silent about both the first enlargement of NATO that took place in 1999 after the dissolution of the USSR (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic) and the second one in 2004 (Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia).

 This stance has to do with the balance of forces among the bourgeois classes of the NATO countries and Russia at that particular historical moment. It is telling that Russia raised the issue of NATO enlargement only starting from V. Putin's ominous speech in Munich (in 2007), when he remembered that the US provided Gorbachev some verbal guarantees not to expand NATO, etc. [4] The Russian bourgeoisie began to feel that it had consolidated its power, that it had to claim space for its own monopolies and in turn create its own capitalist unions in the territories of the former USSR, something that the enlargement of NATO was preventing. An enlargement that had a plan to encircle Russia, with new bases, new troops, new exercises directed against Russia. This enlargement and all the NATO plans against Russia, which were storing up a powder keg, were intended to show Russia that NATO, as the military arm of the EU-US monopolies, would not allow rival interests to challenge the supremacy of their own monopolies. This was also true for Ukraine, which plays a critical role for the interests of the capitalists of both Euro-Atlanticism and Russia.

Today we know that the Russian invasion of Ukraine not only did not stop, but also accelerated the enlargement of NATO, with the accession of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance.

Nor, of course, did it stop the militarization of Ukraine. Thousands of weapons have been concentrated and used in the conflict in Ukraine. Russia claims that NATO intended to put missiles in Ukraine, which would prevent Russia to respond in the event of a first nuclear strike. It is clear that each bourgeois class is trying to increase not only its economic, but also its political and military power. In this direction, it builds new weapons and it develops its armaments. The number of armaments has now reached a record level all over the world.

The US and Russia currently possess the largest nuclear arsenal capable of destroying our planet. There is the so-called "balance of terror". One power knows that it will be destroyed by the other if it is the first to use nuclear weapons against its opponent during a conflict.

NATO is expanding and speaking of the "first nuclear strike". Russia has also abandoned the nuclear "doctrine" that the USSR had, which stipulated its commitment to no first use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances. In general, each power is trying to reverse this "balance of terror" and gain a strategic advantage. For example, Russia has developed missiles with a speed of Mach 9 that currently cannot be shot down by any air defence system and are able to carry nuclear weapons, while the US aims to install anti-missile systems very close to the Russian borders to prevent it from responding massively to a first nuclear strike.

Russia argues that protecting its borders from such a possibility is a matter of "life and death" and it can do so either by achieving the demilitarization of Ukraine or by occupying some of its territories, which would act as a "buffer zone" or even be annexed to the Russian Federation. All the more so since a number of OSCE resolutions stress that "strengthening the defence of one state cannot be at the expense of the security of another". [5] So Russia considers that it is rightfully intervening militarily to stop this development.

The above is half the truth. Not only because international law and the OSCE also mention other things, such as the inviolability of borders and the territorial integrity of countries, [6] but also because the whole truth is that this argument of Russia may apply not only to Ukraine, but also to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland. If we note the straight line distance from Kharkiv to Moscow on a map, we will see that it is about the same as from Riga or Tallinn to Moscow, while the one from Helsinki to Leningrad is even shorter. It becomes obvious that Russia has a different approach as regards to Ukraine, which means that, after all, the reasons for the Russian invasion of Ukraine are other than demilitarization.

The above pretext is also officially used by the Russian bourgeois class to justify its invasion, claiming that it is "de-Nazifying" Ukraine. It is true that, unlike Ukraine’s bourgeois class that has chosen to vindicate the fascists and their collaborators who fought the USSR, Russia’s bourgeois class is utilizing the anti-fascist feelings of the Russian people. This, however, in no way protects children in Russian schools from being "contaminated" with the poison of anti-communism, e.g. of the well-known anti-Soviet Solzhenitsyn, who used to justify the Russian collaborators of the Nazis, admire Franco and support Pinochet. The public and private media programs are riddled with anti-communism, and even the victory over fascist Germany is presented as a victory achieved supposedly without, and sometimes despite, the action of the Bolshevik Party. Nationalist paramilitary organizations, such as the Cossacks, are taking over responsibilities of security forces in border areas. The October Revolution public holiday (7/11) has been scrapped and replaced by a nationalist holiday (4/11), a day of "national unity" many years ago. V. Putin himself publicly states that he studies and recommends to the youth the works of Ivan Ilyin, a Russian ideologist of fascism. He has visited and laid flowers at his grave.

We can therefore deduce that the ruling bourgeois class of Russia is in fact trying to take advantage of the Anti-Fascist Victory, as well as the anti-fascist and pro-Soviet feelings of the Russian people.

 Moreover, the revival of fascist views in Ukraine was not a one-off act, it did not happen once and for all. It lasted for years, with the reintroduction of Goebbels' views on "genocide".

What has the current Russian leadership done all these years to prevent this unacceptable development? It did business, with V. Putin boasting: "in 2011 the turnover of bilateral trade exceeded 50 billion dollars". [7] While Goebbels' propaganda was being revived in Ukraine, Russia was giving Ukraine, as V. Putin said, "material support" and from 1991 to 2013 alone (i.e. the period when fascist ideas were taking root there) the Ukrainian budget benefited to the extent of some $250 billion thanks to Russia's privileged loans and special prices for Russian energy. Even Ukraine's loan obligations from the USSR era were completely met by Russia. So is the West alone responsible for the revival of fascist, Nazi propaganda in Ukraine? Isn't the Russian bourgeois class also responsible for this? With whom were they collaborating? Who were they funding all these years?

Finally, we should not forget that fascism is the creation of the exploitative system, a choice of the bourgeois class, aiming to impose a harsher form of oppression against the workers' and people's movement that will act as its "spearhead", depriving this movement of any legitimate form of action in order to maintain capitalist exploitation, i.e. the bourgeois system. It is, therefore, against revolutionary reason to believe, as some CPs do, that the bourgeois class, even of another country, can actually aim to get rid of fascism, supporting at the same time by all means the "womb" that gives birth to it, namely the capitalist system. No dictatorship of capital can wage a real anti-fascist struggle, including that of Russia. It is no coincidence that in both countries workers' - trade union rights are suspended, anti-war voices are suppressed and communists and other progressive people who question the choices of the bourgeois governments are persecuted.

Another pretext is that Russia was forced to defend the Russian nationals and the Russian-speakers in Donbass, who were facing genocide by the Kiev regime.

It is true that millions of Russians and Russian-speakers, after the dissolution of the USSR, found themselves outside the borders of the Russian Federation, for example, in the regions of Crimea and Donbass.

Did the Russian counter-revolutionary forces, while dismantling the USSR, raise the question of the rights of these people, of which country the regions they lived in would belong to, from that point on? Of course not!

How were these populations treated? They were treated by the then newly formed bourgeoisie of Russia as "pawns" in its geopolitical plans in the territories of the former USSR. Russia expected that in any case they would support the various Russian or pro-Russian parties, which were being formed in a number of these former Soviet Republics, and these in turn would be the "pillars" of the exercise of Russia’s policy in these countries, supporting the various capitalist unions and organizations it promoted.

This was the policy followed by the Russian state with regard to the Russians and Russian-speaking people in Ukraine until 2014, when it became clear that the Ukrainian bourgeoisie would use repressive means to violently "Ukrainianize" the populations in Eastern Ukraine, which led to the reaction and even uprising of a part of these populations. The Russian bourgeoisie took advantage of this justified reaction of Russian and Russian-speaking populations, who stood up against ethnic and language oppression, to promote its own plans. It therefore cut off and annexed Crimea, thus annexing three quarters of the EEZ that Ukraine had in the Azov and Black Seas. It cut off part of the Donbass region while today, after the invasion, it controls almost all of Donbass region, as well as of the one of Kherson, that include a significant part of the industrial base and the arable lands of Ukraine.

The interest of the Russian capitalists in their compatriots outside the borders, "dressed up" with the slogan of the "Russian World" and its reunification, is purely profit-driven. They think that with these some millions of people they will increase the labour force they exploit, using them to "get a foothold" in the industrial base and territories of another country, breaking down its borders and annexing territories that they had agreed in 1991, when they dismantled the USSR, that they did not own.

The fact is that ethnic, religious, language minorities should enjoy the right to have their own language, religion, customs and traditions, and could be pillars of friendship between peoples, not a "tool" for dismembering countries. Because this leads to widespread bloodshed, as it has been the case in various regions, such as the Balkans, where we can see how the bourgeois classes have utilized and continue to utilize such issues.

Moreover, the communists have always been opposed to annexations of territories under the pretext of the "protection of ethnic minorities".

 In practice, the superiority of the multi-ethnic, federal state of the USSR in dealing with issues of ethnic oppression and minorities has been demonstrated both by the creation of national territories, with extended autonomy and self-government, as well as by respecting the particular characteristics that constituted each given ethnic-cultural identity, by preserving and cultivating the language, writing, customs and traditions, literature, poetry of each nation and ethnic group. The allegations of the Russian leadership that Lenin supposedly planted a "time bomb on the foundations of the USSR" with the national policy followed by the Bolsheviks, are totally unfounded and unacceptable.

According to this classless and disorienting approach, the "golden billion", which arbitrarily includes the US and the countries which are its allies, is opposed by the so-called "Russian world".

This concept, shared by Russian communist parties as well, is based on a supposedly cultural, geopolitical, religious approach to international reality. It originates from the view that the world is divided into civilizations, which clash with each other over which one will prevail and which one will assimilate the other.

On this basis, full support is given to the foreign policy of the Russian ruling class, for the creation, among other things, of the transnational capitalist unions that Russia is promoting in the territories of the former USSR, such as the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Moreover, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the argument that there is no Ukrainian nation, that it is a Bolshevik construct, like Ukraine itself, has also emerged, based on the above concept. In this way, the annexation of Ukrainian territory to Russia as well as the imperialist war are justified.

It is a classless approach, which does not take into consideration and even conceals the class character of the capitalist social system, the class in power and the ruling interests. From this point of view, it is not only an unscientific approach, but also a very dangerous one because it lumps the interests of the workers in with those of the industrialists, in the name of the "war of civilizations".

There is a view that Russia, since it is in confrontation with the US, which is "the principal power of imperialism", is an anti-imperialist power and other countries that have a problem with the US are rallying around it. That is, on the one hand there is the axis of imperialism, represented by the US and its other allies, and on the other hand there are the forces of "anti-imperialism".

This is a very problematic and arbitrary approach because it treats imperialism as merely an aggressive policy and not on the basis of Leninist criteria and the basic position that imperialism is monopoly capitalism, capitalism where monopolies rule. This approach disregards the fact that every capitalist country, regardless of the particularities of its political system, is integrated into the global capitalist market, the global imperialist system, with relations of uneven interdependence, which can be compared to an imperialist "pyramid".

 Opening a parenthesis, we would like to add that some opportunist circles are trying to slander our party, by distorting the Leninist approach to imperialism that our Party follows. Thus, they claim that the position of the KKE lumps all the countries that have today reached the level of monopoly capitalism, i.e. imperialism, together; that we consider that "all countries are imperialist, therefore all countries are the same, e.g., that Russia, the USA, Serbia, Burkina Faso and so on are the same". This is just a silly trick against the KKE, since it always clarifies that each capitalist country plays a different role and occupies a different position in the global imperialist system, on the basis of its economic, political and military power.

In practice, the above erroneous approach reduces imperialism to the US and this poses great problems. It characterizes all other capitalist countries, which do not have the power of the US, as vassals of the US and goes as far as seeing as "anti-imperialist powers" those of them that temporally clash or oppose the US or its choices. This approach even fantasizes an "anti-imperialist axis" composed of capitalist states!

This is a very dangerous approach, which rejects the class criteria for analyzing reality and does not take into account the role of the bourgeois classes. It leads not only to wrong political conclusions about the contradictions that unfold in the global imperialist system, but also "urges" the workers to choose a side between "thieves", forgetting which class is in power there, which class interests are served at any given time. This approach can lead to misconceptions as for example the one promoted by the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who misleadingly declared a few years ago, "They don't love me in the West because I am anti-imperialist!"

The presentation of Russia as a "weak", "dependent" imperialist state, which the other "stronger imperialist countries" refuse to treat as an "equal partner", is also widespread. On this basis, the war in Ukraine is interpreted as a "defensive" and "justified" reaction of Russia against the stronger imperialist powers.

Those who make these claims, however, do not take into account that relations between imperialist countries are characterized by inequality and interdependence. It is not only capitalist Russia that is treated as an "unequal partner". Moreover, Russia is the second military power in the world, the only capitalist country that can today threaten with nuclear destruction the strongest imperialist power on the planet, the US; a country with very strong monopolies: it is 5th in billionaires in the world, on the one hand it is 11th in nominal share of the world GDP and 5th in share in real world GDP, as well as in industrial production in the world. It has the capability to advance its foreign policy by exercising its right of veto in the UN Security Council.

Reality shows that Russia has one of the most important positions in this imperialist "pyramid", as a consequence of its economic, political and military capabilities. Overemphasizing the fact that an important orientation of the Russian economy is the extraction of raw materials, ignoring other advanced scientific fields in which Russia is a world leader (construction of nuclear power plants, space missions, trade of modern weapons, vaccines, etc.) is misleading. On the basis of this distorted understanding of Russia's position and of the modern world, some people utilize Lenin's quote about a "handful of countries" —written when three-quarters of the planet was still colonies— as they wish and end up accepting the classless concept of the countries of the so-called "golden billion" (from which powerful capitalist countries such as China and Russia have been removed).

The harmful approach of "exported fascism", which characterizes the US and the EU as "liberal fascism", or describes them as "fascist" or as "exporting fascism", goes in the same direction as the justification of the imperialist war from the point of view of the Russian bourgeoisie.

This division of the states of the international imperialist system into states that are pro-fascist and pro-war and states that are not, in fact, obscures the cause of the rise and consolidation of the fascist current, which is to be found in monopoly capitalism itself and within each country. This division of the imperialist forces into "bad" ("fascist", "neo-fascist") and "good" leads to appeals to the creation of "anti-fascist fronts" in a classless direction, i.e. alliances without social and class criteria, even with bourgeois forces, and to rallying to the side of the so-called "anti-fascist states".

This concept leads the communist movement, the working class to disarm itself, to abandon its historical mission and to form a line of alleged "purification" of imperialism by removing the "fascist forces", in collaboration with bourgeois forces, which exploit the working class and use all means to oppose the cause of socialism. In practice, in the name of confronting fascism, the way is paved for collaboration with opportunism, social democracy and bourgeois political forces, sections of the bourgeoisie. The way is paved for choosing between imperialists. Therefore, in the imperialist arm conflict in Ukraine, the communist movement is called upon to support specific imperialist powers on the pretext that the others are "fascist".

A basic argument of the view of "exported fascism" is that the US violates international law while exercising its foreign policy. The fact that the agreements that make up international law are a product of the balance of forces and as such have become much more reactionary in recent years after the counter-revolutionary overthrows is not taken into account.

This concept recognizes on the one hand that Russia is a capitalist country, but claims that it is not imperialist and that it acts in coordination with "socialist" China. As a matter of fact, the so-called "World Anti-imperialist Platform", which is one of the advocates of this approach, claims that “These are countries that do not live by superexploiting or looting the world.”

It is as if China and Russia do not participate in the G20 summits, the meetings of the 20 most powerful capitalist states of the world, together with the USA, Germany, the UK, France, etc. It is as if the Chinese and Russian monopolies do not export capital to other countries, aiming for the profit that comes from exploiting the labour power not only of the workers of their own country, but also of many other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, wherever their monopolies develop. It is as if the Russian “Wagner” private army is deployed in Africa for charitable reasons and not to defend the interests of the Russian monopolies operating there. It is as if China is no longer moving in a similar direction to safeguard the Belt and Road Initiative, which runs through dozens of countries, by military means. It is notable that this initiative includes the small but very important in geographical terms state of Djibouti —whose debt to China amounts to 43% of its Gross National Income— where China’s first military base outside its borders was inaugurated in 2017.

The statements about countries “that do not put other countries in military, technological or debt slavery” refer to states that play a special role in the arms trade and are currently creditor countries, such as China, which is among the world’s leading creditor nations.

This concept carefully conceals the fact that both in China and Russia the bourgeois classes, the monopolies, are in charge, dealing and clashing with the monopolies of the USA, the EU and other capitalist states and with each other. China even directly challenges the US supremacy in the imperialist system. As Lenin has pointed out, when imperialist vultures clash, the right side of history is not to pick the side of the weaker vulture so that it can take the place of the more powerful one. The right side of history is to choose the side of the peoples against the camp of the capitalists, who sometimes gain from peace and sometimes from war, shedding the blood of the working class and the peoples.

Finally, this concept refers to the attitude of the capitalist countries of the "anti-Hitler coalition", which cooperated with the USSR during the Second World War. The associations it tries to form are obvious. But as we have shown above, today's China cannot be compared to the USSR during WWII, because it has a different class character. Moreover, we should underline that WWII was an imperialist and unjust war, both for the fascist and for the "democratic" capitalist countries. The WWII was just only for the USSR, where the workers' power was established, as well as for the partisan movements of the countries under occupation. Such comparisons are intentional and misleading.

The concepts that argue that through the Russian invasion of Ukraine a modern peaceful (capitalist) world with a different "international architecture" is being created, a "just multipolar world", where "the sovereignty of each country will be respected" are unrealistic and pull the wool over the people’s eyes.

We should note that this is not the first time that such views emerge. On the basis of similar views, various "left-wing" parties welcomed the overthrow of socialist regimes, putting forward the view that this is how the world can be united and that many poles can be formed. They invited the peoples to support the EEC and its transformation into the EU as a "new international pole", which would be the "counterweight" to the USA at a global level.

Today, this mistaken approach of a "multipolar world", where some supposedly “peace-loving” big countries (China, Russia, etc.) will "tame" the aggression of the USA and the other imperialist powers, without having to overthrow capitalism, is being promoted again.

However, just as the EU cannot play the role of a "counterweight" to the USA, so the new powerful capitalist states or the unions that they form and where they play a leading role, will not be able to "contain" and "deter" the imperialist contradictions of which they are constituent parts, but only to express some shifts in the position of the countries that are at the top of the world imperialist pyramid.

The false dilemma between a "unipolar" and a "multipolar" world leads to the disarmament of the working class, cancels the independent workers’–people’s struggle against the exploiters, and place the peoples under a "false flag", even using pretexts claiming that "there are no pure anti-imperialist struggles and pure socialist plans" and supposedly an "alliance of anti-imperialist and progressive forces" is required, including bourgeois political forces, capitalist states and alliances in the name of defending "sovereignty" and equal inter-state relations.

But multipolarity does not abolish the inequality between capitalist states, nor does it abolish the interventions of the stronger capitalist states in the internal affairs of the other bourgeois states, whose bourgeois classes are willing to cede sovereign rights in order to preserve and strengthen their domination. The suppression of the popular uprising in Kazakhstan in 2021 by Russia and its allies with the consent of the "West" is a very instructive example.

Multipolarity is nothing but the existence of various imperialist centres, which not only do not create conditions of balance and peace, but on the contrary, they sharpen the competition between them and lead to local wars caused by inter-imperialist contradictions in a particular country or region. Moreover, the existence of competing imperialist centres poses a risk of conflagration between the strong imperialist countries as well.

In essence, the concept of multipolarity has much in common with the views of the period of the so-called "perestroika", Gorbachev's "new thinking about the world" or, even before that, of "peaceful coexistence and competition between socialism and capitalism", "regional security systems", "peaceful transition", views which prevailed in the CP of the Soviet Union since its 20th and 22nd Congresses and had a catalytic effect, leading to the degeneration of many CPs in the East and West.

Similar views today call upon the working class and popular strata to renounce their own interests or to identify them with the interests of bourgeois classes and imperialist centres competing with US imperialism over the control of the wealth-producing resources and markets.

Today the pretexts utilized by the capitalists and opportunists to align the working class with of the one or the other imperialist power in the imperialist confrontation will be constantly enriched.

 Their ideological and political unmasking and refutation is an important task for any CP that defends Marxism-Leninism, and in particular the Leninist conception of imperialism and war. Lenin stressed that war is an "inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is." Such is the war in Ukraine. The preconditions for this war were set by the historical regression of the counter-revolution in 1989–1991, when the counter-revolutionary process of overthrowing socialism was completed, the USSR was dismantled, the means of production, the factories, the mineral wealth, the labour power became a commodity again and capitalism and class exploitation dominated.

Our struggle against the US and NATO continues to be a timely and necessary revolutionary task. We will not entrust this revolutionary task to various reactionary organizations of the Taliban type, which were linked to the imperialists by a "thousand threads", nor to bourgeois regimes that emerged from counter-revolutionary processes, such as Putin's in today's Russia, nor of course to the billionaire former US President, D. Trump, who also talks about dismantling NATO. Because this task from the point of view of the people's interests against the US, NATO, the EU and all kinds of imperialist centres, alliances and unions, is linked to our strategic goal of overthrowing capitalism and building the new socialist-communist society by disengaging from all imperialist alliances.

Today the international communist movement, in order to be able to meet the demands of this ideological and political struggle, must draw conclusions from its history, defending the conquests of the USSR, the historical contribution of the Communist International, and at the same time studying errors, weaknesses and problematic approaches, which have an influence on its ranks to this day, with a critical eye.

[1] Address by the President of the Russian Federation, V. Putin, 24/02/22, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843

[2] Address by the President of the Russian Federation, B. Yeltsin, to the US Congress, 17/06/1992, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1992-pt11/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1992-pt11-4-2.pdf

[3] Interview of V. Putin to Tucker Carlson, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73411

[4] Speech by V. Putin and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034

[5] Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Charter for European Security, Istanbul November 1999, https://www.osce.org/mc/17502

[6] Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Helsinki Final Act, 1975, https://www.osce.org/helsinki-final-act

[7] “Putin expects trade turnover between Russia and Ukraine to reach 50bn dollars by the end of the year”, TASS Russian News Agency, 18/10/2011, https://tass.ru/politika/536000