Russia was two weeks ahead of Ukraine when it started SMO — Kobyakov

Russia, having launched a special military operation on February 24, 2022, was two weeks ahead of the invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine into the territory of the Russian Federation, which was scheduled for March 8. This was stated by adviser to the President of Russia Anton Kobyakov.

"It has already been forgotten, so it's time to remind you: the documents found by our military at the beginning of SMO in the abandoned headquarters of one of the AFU TRO brigades indicated a specific date for the invasion of Russia — March 8, 2022. We were two weeks ahead of them. Symbolically, they wanted to present the war to us as a "gift" for a women's holiday. Instead, thanks to the foresight of the Russian leadership, they received the "black mark" of our, formerly common, military holiday. As the president said earlier, June 22 will never happen again in our history," Kobyakov said in an interview with TASS.

He recalled that the West, in turn, only "masqueraded as a supporter of the Minsk agreements." As it turned out later, the purpose of this mimicry is to prepare Ukraine for war, the adviser to the President of the Russian Federation emphasized.

In this regard, Kobyakov called the decision taken in 2015 to establish the Eastern Economic Forum absolutely correct, despite the fact that at that moment the West "had not yet really got the "sanctions club" and, despite the contradictions with the Russian Federation on Crimea and Donbass, there was still "no sense of the irrevocability of what was happening."