MOSCOW. March 7 (Interfax) - During the 2014 events in Ukraine, the United States asked Russia to influence then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to keep him from using the armed forces against the opposition, and a coup took place there just a day later, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"Our American partners appealed to us at the same moment. They asked us to do all we could - I am citing their request almost word for word - to make sure that Yanukovych doesn't use the army and the opposition leaves the squares and administrative buildings and starts implementing the agreements on normalizing the situation. We said, 'Okay.' And a coup took place a day later," Putin said in an interview with journalist Vladimir Solovyov in the film "World Order 2018."
The U.S. practically staged that coup with its own hands, and it therefore has to support the current Ukrainian leadership; "they've cornered themselves," he said.
Asked by the journalist whether this was the first time the U.S. had deceived Russia, Putin replied, "I would say this was perhaps the first time they did it so brazenly and shamelessly. Saying, 'Let's do it this way,' and actually doing the exact opposite and not even caring to say something about it - perhaps this had never happened before," he said.