At a meeting with the permanent members of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the crisis in Ukraine has an internal character and did not arise because of Russia.
"Of course, we cannot ignore all the events that are developing around Ukraine and Crimea, and of all that concerns this difficult problem that has arisen,"he said. "I want to emphasize it is not our fault that there was a crisis, but we are somehow involved in it," Putin is quoted by ITAR-TASS.
"Let's think together on how we build relationships with our partners and friends in Ukraine and with our other partners in Europe and the United States," he proposed.
The Ukrainian topic, Putin said, was not scheduled for today's meeting. "The first planned topic was the development of relations between the Russian Federation and the countries of Central America and the Caribbean," he said.
