Putin wants to replace G7 with P5 to be able to veto any decision – Yatsenyuk

"Russia's agenda is completely different from the rest of the free world’s. Putin's agenda is the restoration of the Soviet Union. Putin's plan is to seize even more European territories and to become the strongest autocratic leader on the European continent. He does not want Ukraine to succeed. That is why he will never execute the Minsk deal. He can execute it only "in the Russian translation," Yatsenyuk said during the Kyiv Security Forum online discussion on June 26. 

Yatsenyuk stressed that Putin's so-called article for National Interest can be described as "back to the USSR in Putin's interpretation": "Putin wants to consolidate his electorate and the Russian people with a very clear message -"look, it is the West who collaborated with the Nazis." This is what he actually wrote in the article. It is as if Stalin and Hitler did not start a war against the whole world. But it was their Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that triggered World War II. This article is a deception and the conspiracy theory that Putin is trying to spread."

The most important thing in Putin's article is the idea to substitute G7 with P5. "This is his ultimate goal. As the president of Russia, he wants to block any decisions using the veto power," Yatsenyuk emphasized.

"It is very important for all of us to understand - we must defend the truth, we must defend the facts. And we have to be very open and to tell our nations: we defended the world, we won the Second World War, we defeated the Nazis, it's us who suffered. And we will build our future - not with the archaic outdated Putin's approaches. But we will build our future based on the values of the free world, real facts, evidence, and truth," he said.

The chairman of the KSF stressed that there are a number of voices that say that the compromise with Russia has to be found. He recalled that at one time both our American and European partners "tried to reset, reload, find a compromise": "But we all failed. Because the convictions we have are different than Russia’s."

"From the Ukrainian standpoint, it is practically impossible to find any kind of compromise with the Russian Federation. The key precondition for even starting a dialogue is to get back Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. This is the key precondition. Look at the list of criminal charges against the Russian president and the Russian Federation. The illegal annexation of Crimea, occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk, assassination and killing of Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian military. So how can we get along with the country that invaded Ukraine?" Yatsenyuk emphasized.

He stressed the importance of strong leadership of the United States and Germany and the maintaining of the unity of the European Union.

"One of the most challenging issues in contemporary Ukraine is to have very strong leadership of the incumbent Ukrainian government. We must follow the same page with our Western friends. And the Ukrainian leaders have to realize that this is the historic mission of the incumbent president, of this government and all the political leadership - to save Ukraine, to restore territorial integrity, to continue the path of reform, to be successful, to fight for our independence and our freedom. Together with our American and European friends," Yatsenyuk emphasized.