MOSCOW, March 5. /TASS/: Up to 14,000 civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk republics have been killed since 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday.
"What I am going to say may sound harsh. Yet the situation forces me to say aloud what has just occurred to me. As you may have heard, stray dogs these days begin to attack people in various regions. Some get injured. There have even been lethal cases," Putin said.
At as certain point, people "begin to poison and shoot these animals." He made a reservation that even the stray dogs were a separate problem and "the local authorities are obliged to address it."
"Now listen to this: the Donbass people are NOT stray dogs! Yet, 13,000-14,000 of them have been killed there over years. More than 500 children have been killed or crippled," Putin said.
He believes what is particularly intolerable is the so-called civilized West has preferred not to notice this for eight years.
"Moreover, the authorities in Kiev began to say outright lately that they are not going to implement these agreements (Minsk-2 - TASS). They have been saying so all along on TV and on the Internet - everywhere! They state in public: "We don’t like it, we won’t do it," Putin explained.
In the meantime, Russia continued to be accused of failing to implement the agreements.
"But that’s nonsense. It’s absurd. They argue that white is black and that black is white," he shared his impression of the latest events.
