The Russian foreign minister spoke on Tuesday at a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva, via videoconference, given the impossibility of traveling to Switzerland due to the closure of European airspace to Russia.
“The current Kiev regime is a living example of the fact that when you are a loyal vassal of a hegemonic power and participate with particular zeal in serving its policy of containing Russia, you can as you please,” he said.
Lavrov criticized the double standards of the attitude of the United States and its allies, “directly responsible for numerous violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, guilty of crimes that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan,” and called “Russophobic frenzy” the Western countries’ decision to supply Ukraine with weapons.
The official pointed out that the real hysteria seen in NATO and in the European Union only confirms that the objective of the United States and all its allies was and remains the creation of an “anti-Russia”.
According to the head of Russian diplomacy, those who seized power in Kiev as a result of a Western-backed coup unleashed the real terror in Ukraine. The constant imposition of neo-Nazism and the massive attacks on rights and freedoms in Ukraine take place with the collusion of the United States and its allies, “which arrogantly declare themselves to be models of democracy.”
Lavrov said that the international human rights mechanisms of the UN, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe could not gather the courage to adequately react to the scandalous lawlessness in Ukraine all these years.
He also assured that Russia respects the Ukrainian people and has no intention of violating the interests of its citizens, with whom “we are united not only by a common history, a civilizational, spiritual and cultural kinship, but also by blood and family ties.” In Lavrov’s words, millions of Ukrainians live in Russia. “To us, they are our people. Together we have always been and will be much stronger and more successful.”
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