The US State Department did not believe Putin's words about the absence of Russian troops in Ukraine

The official representative of the US State Department Marie Harf, while communicating with reporters, said that she did not believe in the statement of Russian President Vladimir Putin about the absence of Russian troops in Ukraine.

“As Secretary of State Kerry has spoke many times, no propaganda will make a lie true. I think we have known since the beginning of April that the Russian armed forces have been continuing to operate in eastern Ukraine,” Harf said during a press briefing on April 16.

A few hours before, the President of the Russian Federation on the air of the program "Direct Line with Vladimir Putin" said that at present there are no Russian troops in Ukraine. “The question is whether our troops are in Ukraine, I tell you directly and definitely: there are no Russian troops in Ukraine,” Putin said .

As evidence of his words, the head of state cited the statement of the Ukrainian general, who stated that his troops in the Donbass did not fight Russian soldiers. “Directly and publicly at a meeting with his foreign colleagues, he said: we are not fighting with the Russian army,” the President of the Russian Federation recalled.

Putin’s statement about the absence of Russian troops in the Donbass was made after an agreement on the ceasefire and, in particular, on the allocation of heavy weapons, were reached in February 2015 in February 2015. Messages that Russian troops were present in Ukraine began to appear in the late summer of 2014.

As for the statement of the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Viktor Muzhenko, which he made on January 29, 2015, the colonel general said that Ukrainian soldiers were not conducting "direct hostilities" with the army of the Russian Federation. “To date, we have only the facts of the participation of individual military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and citizens of the Russian Federation as part of illegal armed groups,” Viktor Muzhenko explained on the air of one of the Ukrainian television channels.

"Direct line with Vladimir Putin" took place on April 16. The president talked with the Russians for 3 hours and 58 minutes. During this time, more than 70 questions were asked the head of state. Some of them were devoted to the events in Ukraine and the current situation in the world.