Sputnik News
Ukraine descended into chaos in late 2013 after the Yanukovych government reversed course on penning an association agreement with the European Union in favor of integration with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union instead. In February of 2014, the Ukrainian president was overthrown in a US-sponsored coup, sparking the present security crisis.
The terms "impunity" or "lawlessness" aptly characterize the situation that Ukraine has been in for over eight years now, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
"As I understand it, today's meeting was motivated by the desire of some delegations to discuss the subject of lawlessness/impunity in Ukraine. I think this is very, very timely, because this term - lawlessness/impunity, reflects what has been happening in this country since 2014," Lavrov said, speaking at a United Nations Security Council ministerial meeting on Ukraine on Thursday.
"For more than eight years the Ukrainian Army and nationalist militant formations have been killing the inhabitants of the Donbass with impunity, only because they refused to recognize the results of the criminal, bloody, anti-constitutional coup in Kiev, because they decided to defend rights guaranteed to them under the Ukrainian Constitution, including the right to freely use their native Russian tongue," the foreign minister said.
Lavrov accused Kiev of spending years waging a "total frontal offensive" against the Russian language through a series of laws adopted in 2017, 2020, and 2021, all of which he said were directed at "squeezing out the Russian language, in fact, its total ban."
The minister compared Ukrainian authorities' destruction of Russian-language books in schools and the demolition of monuments to Russian writers to the kind of thing the Nazis in Germany did in the 1930s.
The minister slammed international organizations such as the Council of Europe, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, and other structures for their "timid recommendations" when it came to pushing Kiev to improve the language and human rights situation in the country before the escalation of the security crisis.
Lavrov also accused the Ukrainian Army and nationalist battalions of using "terrorist tactics" in the course of the conflict with Russia, including the use of civilians as human shields. Moscow, he said, no longer has any doubts that contemporary Ukraine has become a "Nazi-style totalitarian state where the norms of international humanitarian law are violated with impunity."
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