Russia will defeat the U.S.-led NATO axis in its Ukraine proxy war. But the victory has taken longer and has been more bloody than if Putin had acted sooner.

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President Vladimir Putin made an interesting admission in a recent interview with Russian media. He said he “regretted” not acting sooner to order the military operation in Ukraine.

Overall, Putin sounded confident in the interview about the prospects of victory in Ukraine against the U.S.-led NATO proxy war. The conflict marks two years this week since Russian forces entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Independent analysts and even Western media outlets are admitting that the NATO-backed Kiev regime is teetering on defeat by superior Russian military forces. The fall of the strategic city of Avdiyivka in recent days portends a final collapse for the regime.

Russia controls about 20 percent of the territory in the east and south of what was Ukraine. The territory includes the Donbass region and Crimea which are now a legal, integral part of the Russian Federation.

Nonetheless, the Russian leader candidly said in the interview that he should have ordered Russia’s military to confront the Ukrainian regime sooner.

Russia’s news agency Tass quotes Putin as saying: “The only thing we can regret is that we did not start our active actions earlier, believing that we were dealing with decent people.”

Putin did not specify how much sooner Russia should have launched its special military operation to defend the ethnic Russian people of former east Ukraine and denazify the NATO-backed Kiev regime.

He was referring to the Minsk Peace Accords which were negotiated in 2014 and 2015 through mediation by Germany, France and Russia.

Putin added: “It turned out later that we were being deceived in this regard because both the former German chancellor [Angela Merkel] and the former president of France [Francois Hollande] admitted straightforwardly in the public that they never planned to fulfill the agreements. Instead, they were buying time to deliver more weapons to the Kiev regime, which is exactly what they did.”

In early May 2014, I wrote an article headlined: “Putin Should Send Troops Into Ukraine”.

It may have seemed a reckless statement at the time but subsequent events over the past decade have vindicated its argument.

The article was first published around May 4, 2014, by the Iranian news outlet Press TV where I was writing a regular column (until American sanctions against Iran killed my work there). The link to my original opinion piece on Press TV seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Fortunately, it was republished at the time by other sites, including the website of Paul Craig Roberts. Roberts is a highly respected American writer and informed commentator who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

My column cited the massacre in Odessa on May 2 where more than 40 civilians were murdered. They were protesting against the NATO-backed NeoNazi regime that had seized power in Kiev in February 2014 as a result of a CIA-sponsored coup against an elected pro-Russian president. The anti-fascist protesters were sheltering in the city’s Trade Union House building which was set on fire by the Kiev regime supporters. The article also highlighted how the CIA boss at the time John Brennan had visited Kiev the month before, during April 2014, and two months after the coup which brought the current NeoNazi regime to power. The CIA directed the so-called “anti-terror operation” by the Kiev regime after the coup. The regime’s NeoNazi paramilitaries armed and trained by NATO began attacking the Russian people in the Donbass who were against the illegal seizure of power in Kiev. The ensuing NATO-fueled civil war went on to kill around 14,000 people and led to over a million being displaced.

The civil war and aggression against the Donbass population over eight years from 2014 to 2022 eventually led to Putin ordering Russian troops to intervene two years ago.

Of course, the Western governments and media have distorted history by vilifying Putin and Russia for “invading” Ukraine allegedly without provocation, violating its sovereignty, and threatening the rest of Europe.

As Putin noted in his recent interview cited above, the main reason why he delayed military intervention was that Moscow had been deceived by Germany, France, and the rest of NATO. The Russian leadership believed that the Western powers were genuine in their avowed commitment to resolving the Ukraine conflict diplomatically under the Minsk Accords.

The referenced article by this author was published before the Minsk Accords were established. Here is a clip from that article.

“The present situation [in Ukraine, May 2014] resembles the previous covert U.S.-led operation in South Ossetia in 2008 when NATO-backed Georgian troops tried to destabilize that country, a Russian ally. Russia acted decisively then, sent in its troops, and routed the NATO plot. And Washington backed down.

“Washington is at it again: subverting, lying, killing and threatening [in Ukraine]. But it’s a cowardly bluff that Putin should slap down immediately. The reality is much too serious to entertain these cynical Western games. People’s lives are in real danger in Ukraine from the fascist paramilitaries and politician-gangsters that Washington installed in Kiev and to which it is now giving full vent. The bloody events this weekend [in Odessa] are tragic testimony to the urgent threat.”

My article urged President Putin to send troops into Ukraine to prevent a bigger escalation of war. It laid out an argument that the NATO powers – if unchecked – would ramp up the violence and threat to Russia.

At that time of writing, the deaths caused by the NATO-backed fascists in Ukraine after the February coup in 2014 amounted to 100 or so. As the aggression escalated from 2014 until 2022, the death toll increased to 14,000. After two years of conflict in Ukraine following the launch of the Russian operations, the death toll has gone to at least 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers and an unknown number on the Russian military side. Scores of Russian civilians have also been killed with longer-range NATO weapons fired by the Kiev regime on the pre-war territory of the Russian Federation. Moreover, NATO has become more and more deeply involved in the proxy war as direct antagonists with Russia.

Arguably, the conflict could have been contained if Russia had acted much earlier to defend its interests. President Putin himself has expressed regret for not acting sooner.

I don’t presume President Putin read my original article published nearly 10 years ago. But if he had taken the initiative then instead of delaying to confront the NATO forces before they consolidated the threat in Ukraine, Putin could have averted much of the destruction and death that ensued.

This isn’t a case of hindsight being a wonderful thing. The warning signs were evident back in 2014. Russia should have intervened sooner, as President Putin now admits.

In the end, Russia will defeat the U.S.-led NATO axis in its Ukraine proxy war. But the victory has taken longer and has been more bloody than if Putin had acted sooner.

In any case, at least one constructive lesson has been learned. The United States and its NATO minions can never be trusted. Russia must always act decisively to safeguard its interests and conduct relations with the Western powers on the basis that they are inherently treacherous, malicious in intent, and completely unreliable.