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The Ukrainian armed coup was organized from Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in an interview for a new documentary aired Sunday. The Americans tried to hide behind the Europeans, but Moscow saw through the trick, he added.

“The trick of the situation was that outwardly the [Ukrainian] opposition was supported mostly by the Europeans. But we knew for sure that the real masterminds were our American friends,”Putin said in a documentary, ‘Crimea – The Way Home,’ aired by Rossiya 1 news channel.

“They helped training the nationalists, their armed groups, in Western Ukraine, in Poland and to some extent in Lithuania,” he added.

“They facilitated the armed coup.”

The West spared no effort to prevent Crimea’s reunification with Russia, “by any means, in any format and under any scheme,” he noted.

Putin said this approach was far from being the best dealing with any country, and a post-Soviet country like Ukraine specifically.

Such countries have a short record of living under a new political system and remain fragile.

Violating constitutional order in such a country inevitably deal a lot of damage to its statehood, the president said.

“The law was thrown away and crashed. And the consequences were grave indeed. Part of the country agreed to it, while another part wouldn’t accept it. The country was shattered,” Putin explained.

He also accused the beneficiaries of the coup of planning an assassination of then-President Viktor Yanukovich.

Russia was prepared to act to ensure his escape, Putin said.

“I invited the heads of our special services, the Defense Ministry and ordered them to protect the life of the Ukrainian president.

Otherwise he would have been killed,” he said, adding that at one point Russian signal intelligence, which was tracking the president’s motorcade route, realized that he was about to be ambushed.

Yanukovich himself didn’t want to leave and rejected the offer to be evacuated from Donetsk, Putin said.

Only after spending several days in Crimea and realizing that “there was no one he could negotiate with in Kiev” he asked to be taken to Russia.

READ MORE: US boosting ‘anti-propaganda’ budget, mulling ‘increase of lethality’ for Ukraine support – Nuland

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