my guest is pro—putin russian mp maria butina.vasion�*s second month, what do russians think it's achieving? maria butina in kirov, russia, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. hello. president putin insists that his so—called special military operation is going to plan. after five weeks, with everything we've seen in ukraine with this war, do you think that is true? yeah, absolutely. i think it's true because it would be naive from the west to expect that this operation could end in a week. i have heard speculation about it, and some people would say, "well, it should end quickly." i don't think so, because russian forces are very careful, so they don't hurt the civilian population. if they wanted to finish it very quickly, they could just, you know, smash the whole territory. but we don't do it. we do as careful as possible so the civilians don't suffer. but that sort of misses one key point, doesn't it? we understand very clearly that vladimir putin expected ukrainian resistance to be minimal. he expected resistance to crumble and t