Really?
"We're always being told that our forces on the Ukrainian border are a concern. We have withdrawn them. Today they are not on the Ukrainian border, they are in places where they conduct their regular tasks on training grounds," Putin was quoted as saying.
Forty thousand troops don't get back to their bases overnight. So, no, I don't believe Putin until we can verify what Putin says.
I think it is far more likely that Putin ordered his troops to leave their border deployment camps in order to invade Ukraine than to return to their peacetime stations.
