Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivers remarks at the High-Level Segment of the UN Human Rights Council’s 49th session, via videoconference on Tuesday.
The situation around the world is becoming increasingly complex. It is deteriorating right in front of our eyes. This is because the United States and its allies persist with their aggressive efforts to impose the so-called “rules-based order” on other members of the international community. How has this “order” affected human rights? Ukraine is a telling example in this regard.
It is the policy of the Washington-led “collective West” which is to blame for the fact that the Kiev regime has been at war with its own people since 2014. It has been at war with everyone who does not agree with the neo-Nazi “Maidan values,” with the criminal policy of the Ukrainian authorities, which have been systematically violating human rights and the rights of ethnic minorities, as well as the commitments Kiev has within the UN and the OSCE, and even the Constitution of their own country.
Lies about the Second World War are being shamelessly inculcated. Hitler's local henchmen are proclaimed heroes, and actual anti-fascist heroes are forgotten. Monuments to those who defeated Nazism are being demolished. War criminals who fought in the ranks of the Third Reich are being glorified. The most recent step came in the form of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine sending a draft law about Ukraine's withdrawal from the CIS Agreement on Perpetuating the Memory of the Courage and Heroism of the Peoples in the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War to the Verkhovna Rada on February 23. And so it was utterly blasphemous for Vladimir Zelensky to declare, on the very same day, that he honours the memory of his grandfather who fought in the Red Army to liberate the Soviet Union and Europe from Nazism.
The former authorities headed by President Poroshenko, with the support of Washington, effected a church schism and created what is now known as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Laws have been adopted against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Its churches are being seized, and millions of its parishioners and clergy are being persecuted. What is this other than a violation of religious freedom?
The West began to turn a blind eye to what was happening back in February 2014, when the radicals carried out an unconstitutional coup and tore up the agreement, backed by EU guarantees, with the then President of Ukraine. The putschists who came to power declared their intention of seeking alliance with the West and immediately launched an offensive against the Russian language, resolved to expel everything that is Russian from Crimea, and sent gunmen there. The eastern regions of Ukraine that opposed the coup were accused of terrorism, although they had not attacked anyone. On the contrary, punitive battalions were used against them; their cities were bombed from the air and fired at from artillery and multiple launch rocket systems. They destroyed civilian sites, schools, and hospitals. They killed civilians. An inhuman economic, transport and food blockade was imposed on Donbass. The Kiev regime got away with all of that. International organisations, at best, were limited to impotently calling on “both sides.”
The United States and its allies, which are directly responsible for numerous violations of human rights and international humanitarian law and are guilty of crimes that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, once again apply double standards. The current Kiev regime is a vivid example of the fact that when you are a loyal vassal of the hegemon and participate with particular zeal in serving his policy of containing Russia, you can do anything you like. You can trample upon human rights and freedoms, kill people, and cultivate neo-Nazi traditions and practices. In exchange for your absolute fealty and obedience, the “civilised” West will turn a blind eye to everything. Moreover, the other day, the European Union, in a fit of Russophobic frenzy, decided to supply lethal weapons to Kiev. For us, the life of every Russian and Ukrainian, every resident of Donetsk and Lugansk, is as valuable as the life of a European or an American.
"The West’s arrogant philosophy based on a sense of its own superiority, exceptionalism, and licence must come to an end," Lavrov stressed.
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