President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, claimed in an interview with state media that he refused to invade Ukraine in 2014 because he thought he could resolve the conflict through diplomatic means. “We thought we could resolve the situation peacefully. Now we realize we were wrong, none of our partners intend to resolve anything peacefully,” he said.
As you remember, the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 is a sequence of events that took place during February and March of that year, when Moscow invaded the peninsula and then annexed it from Ukraine. Putin tried to justify the annexation in a referendum, in which the Russian-speaking majority voted to join Russia.
The international community, for the most part, did not recognize the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol as part of Russia, and rejected the results of the referendum. In the vote on UN General Assembly Resolution 68/262, which supported the position that Crimea and Sevastopol would remain part of Ukraine, 100 countries supported, 11 opposed, 58 abstained and 24 were absent.