Putin cancels Kremlin speech to annex 4 Ukrainian regions

MOSCOW Reuters president Vladimir Putin canceled a ceremony on Friday in the Kremlin to annex four Ukrainian regions partially occupied by his forces. The following excerpts from his speech were translated by Reuters:

I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me, so that they remember this. Our citizens are living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. We call on the Kyiv regime to immediately end hostilities, end the war they unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table.

We are ready for this, but we won't discuss the choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. That was made. Russia will not betray them. We will defend our land with all the powers and means at our disposal. In 1991, in Belovezh Forest, without asking the will of ordinary citizens, representatives of the then-party elites decided to destroy the USSR, and people suddenly found themselves cut off from their motherland. This tore apart and dismembered our nation, making it a national catastrophe. I admit that they did not fully understand what they were doing, and what consequences this would ultimately lead to in the end. This is no longer important. The past can't be brought back, because there is no Soviet Union. Russia does not need it anymore. The battlefield to which fate and history have called us is the battlefield for our people, for great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Sanctions for the Anglo-Saxons were not enough: they moved on to sabotage. It is hard to believe but they have organized the blasts on the international gas pipelines Nord Stream that run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It is clear to everyone who benefits from this. The United States is the only country in the world that has twice used nuclear weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and setting a precedent. They actually occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries, and at the same time cynically call them allies of equal standing. The dictatorship of Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of Western countries themselves, because they have moved on to a radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family. This is a complete denial of humanity, the overthrow of faith and traditional values. The suppression of the freedom itself has taken on the features of a religion: outright Satanism. The West began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, and then followed slavery trade, the plunder of India, the slaughter of India, the wars of England and France against China. What they did was hooking entire nations on drugs, deliberately exterminating entire ethnic groups. They hunted people like animals for the sake of land and resources. This is contrary to the very nature of man, truth, freedom and justice. Do we really want to have a parent No in our country, in Russia, instead of'mum' and 'dad'? 3' Have they gone completely insane? Do we really want children in our schools to be taught that there are supposedly genders besides women and men, and children to be offered the chance to undergo sex change operations?