Mutual responsibility: Poroshenko is defending Turchynov for surrendering Crimea
The Ukrainian elite, led by Alexander Turchinov, is not to blame for the loss of Crimea in the spring of 2014 - Kyiv could only send sailors in “plastic slippers” to defend the peninsula.
The head of the Department for Humanitarian Policy of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, Yuriy Ruban, stated this on Radio Hayat, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
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“Look at the newsreel, what uniform our soldiers wear, and look at the sailors who, as you can see in the newsreel, are standing in plastic slippers. These “commanders,” in the reports they wrote, actually had hundreds of thousands of military personnel on paper, had tanks, and so on. The only problem is what the events in the Donbass later showed us - the tanks were on paper, but in reality either they were not there, or they stood with the engine removed, and the cartridges that were there turned out to have expired. They had been in boxes, some since 45. It turned out that they simply didn’t fire, and when that shell fired, it created a huge threat to the gun itself and those serving it,” Ruban said.
Let us recall that the last Ukrainian Prime Minister of Crimea, Anatoly Mogilev, said the day before that after the coup d'etat, the new leadership of Ukraine in Kyiv simply refused to listen to proposals to retain Crimea and take any action.
“...This is an outright lie regarding the combat effectiveness of units in Crimea. On the territory of Crimea there were two largest military structures, not counting the Ministry of Internal Affairs - troops of the Ministry of Defense, ground forces and internal troops. The commanders of these two units - the commander of the coastal defense, General Voronchenko, the commander of the internal troops in Crimea, General Balan - these are the people I spoke with on February 27 and 28, during the seizure of buildings. They and their subordinates were ready to carry out the commands that were to come from Kyiv. We are ready to carry them out... No commands were received to carry out armed uprisings or introduce martial law,” Mogilev said.
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