'We will take tough response measures against the US and EU'

Before answering your question, I’d like to highlight few important points to help your readers to grasp the meaning of what is going on in Ukraine.

As you are aware, the President of the Russian Federation, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of our country, on 24 February made a decision to launch a special military operation in accordance with Article 51, Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, with the authorisation of the Russian Parliament and pursuant to the treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance signed with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic (DPR and LPR).

The goal of the operation is to protect the people who, for the last eight years, have been suffering humiliation and genocide at the hands of the Kyiv regime that came to power through an anti-constitutional coup in 2014. Another task of the operation is to bring the current puppet regime and its “officials” to justice for crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation, committed throughout those years, and to demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.

We have been doing our best for eight years to urge the Kyiv authorities to stop the punitive operation against their own people, to settle the conflict in Donbas by peaceful, political and diplomatic means, to establish direct dialogue with Donetsk and Lugansk as per Paragraph 4 of the Minsk Package of Measures, which obliges the Ukrainian authorities to launch a dialogue on the modalities of holding local elections and a future status of those regions under Ukrainian legislation.

Unfortunately, we have been ignored. Kyiv, with support from the West, has been evading its commitments under the Minsk agreements in every possible way, trying to shift responsibility for its own actions onto our country. The Ukrainian authorities have been openly violating their own constitution and legislation and adopted discriminatory laws on language, education and native peoples.

In turn, the United States and certain Western countries rolled out a massive anti-Russia disinformation campaign. Under its guise, they pumped weaponry into Ukraine, sent their military advisers and held large-scale military exercises. In fact, they sought military exploitation of the country’s territory with special goals. Meanwhile, Russia’s repeated concerns were ignored both by the Kyiv regime and its patrons abroad.

I would like to place special emphasis on the fact that during the special military operation in Ukraine, the Russian armed forces have not launched missile, airborne or artillery strikes on the country’s cities. The strikes take out military infrastructure, air defence facilities, military airfields and the Ukrainian air forces.

According to available information, confirmed by objective monitoring data, we see that, nationalists and neo-Nazis are placing heavy weapons, including multiple fire systems, right in the central areas of major cities, including Kyiv and Kharkov. They plan to call backfire from Russian strike complexes on residential areas. They act like terrorists all over the world – they hide behind peaceful people.

It is a well-known fact that all these have been done on the advice of foreign consultants, primarily American advisers.

We do hope that the Ukrainian people will rid themselves of an oppressive, nationalist government, which is exploiting the country in the interests of foreign actors, and will begin to exercise full sovereignty while respecting the rights, freedoms and interests of all their citizens without dividing them along ethnic, language or religious lines.

Turning to the question of sanctions, the European Union and the United States have decided to impose unilateral restrictive measures on Russia – the illegitimate practice of Washington used against so many sovereign countries all over the world, including Bangladesh. Instead of analysing what happened and critically re-evaluating their role in the situation in Ukraine in general and in Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in particular, they opted for sanctions mistakenly believing that they are an efficient way forward.

As a reminder, the Western countries do not have a monopoly over international law or the driving forces behind international development. Under Article 8 of the Charter for European Security adopted at the OSCE Summit in Istanbul in November 1999, neither the EU, nor NATO “can have any preeminent responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the OSCE area or can consider any part of the OSCE area as its sphere of influence.” No one authorised the EU to address the problems of war and peace in Europe; only the UN Security Council has this international legal prerogative.

Instead, the European Union and the United States have been pursuing a policy of covering up the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian regime, responsible for the destruction of its own country and destabilisation of the situation in Europe. Following open support for the anti-constitutional coup in Ukraine in 2014, the EU once again betrayed European ideals of respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms, trying to punish the peoples of the DPR and LPR for their democratic choice and self-determination. Hypocrisy has been elevated to the rank of politics.

Our repeated messages to Kyiv and its Western handlers about the need to stop the violence in Donbas and to implement the Minsk Package of Measures have fallen on deaf ears. For them, the people of the DPR and LPR are just a bargaining chip. Even after Russia recognized the independence of these republics, the shelling not only did not stop, but even intensified. Given these circumstances, a decision was made to conduct a special military operation aimed to stop the tragedy in Ukraine, which began after the illegal coup in 2014.

The EU continuing unfriendly steps against Russia and Russia’s fraternal DPR and LPR will not be able to stop the progressive development of our states and the provision of assistance to them. In accordance with the principle of reciprocity, which is fundamental to international law, we will take tough response measures.

For many years, the USA and the European Union, projecting themselves as peacemakers, lavishly financed the Kyiv regime, which came to power in the anti-constitutional coup. The American and EU citizens and agencies involved in the delivery of lethal weapons, fuels and lubricants to the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be held responsible for any consequences of these actions during the ongoing special military operation.

The Brussels officials, who only recently posed as a “strategic partner” of Russia, are saying openly that they intend to inflict the maximum possible damage on Russia, hit its weak spots, batter the Russian economy and suppress Russia’s economic growth.

We are confident that this is not going to work. We will give a tough response to the American and EU actions. Russia will continue defending its vital national interests, notwithstanding the sanctions or threats of sanctions. The Western countries should wake up to the fact that the days of their undivided rule in the global economy are long gone.

We view the statements by certain NATO countries on their preparation of new supplies of lethal weapons to Ukraine as the continuation of irresponsible policy aimed at military escalation in that country. First, such actions do not correspond with the appeals for peace from those very countries. Second, military supplies sent to the Kyiv regime to be used against Russian military personnel and civilians, create utterly unacceptable risks. The Russian side believes that it is extremely important to avoid situations and incidents which could lead to the direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

Russia voted against the proposed draft resolution, because its authors offer to concede that the Security Council is not able to uphold its main responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. The draft has not a slightest hint of an attempt to find a constructive solution within the Council. Two days ago, we vetoed another draft resolution for the same reason – it was lopsided and misbalanced. This time we saw no new initiatives either.

The United Nations and the Security Council were created in the post-war period so that to avoid the scourge of a new war. To achieve this, the global powers consented to make agreements, ideally – find consensus, but in any case – never to attempt imposing their decisions upon each other or try to ignore the interests of any of P5 members. That is why the Security Council envisages the right for the permanent member states to veto its decisions. This is not a privilege, but a tool for ensuring the balance of interests, which the world needs so badly, and ensuring global stability through this balance. An attempt to disregard and ignore the position of Russia contradicts the very basics of the UN Charter. What we need is not to push forward such schemes, but to try and find points of contact, no matter how hard our Western partners try to evade this, for example when ignoring our legitimate concerns with regard to NATO’s policy and actions of Western states which undermined the fundamental OSCE principles on the indivisibility of security.

Now we need to focus on correcting the situation that led to the crisis that we are living through. It did not start when Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine. It started much earlier, when you spent 8 years pretending not to notice the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists in Donbas. And again, today you find no words of sympathy for the people of Donbas.

It is the houses in Donbas that were destroyed by nationalists and Ukraine’s armed forces that Western media most often brazenly present as the consequences of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. We hear ceaseless lies and fakes about indiscriminate bombardments of Ukrainian cities, hospitals, and schools.

Russian military forces pose no threat to Ukraine’s peaceful citizens, they do not fire at civilian targets. What does pose a threat is Ukrainian nationalists who in fact hold the people of Ukraine as hostages, using them as a human shield. There is numerous evidence, disseminated by ordinary Ukrainians, proving that nationalists, despite people’s protests, deploy heavy equipment and multiple rocket launchers in residential quarters. This is a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, that must be duly condemned. Basically, it is the same tactics as used by ISIL terrorists. All responsibility for possible consequences rests with the Kyiv regime.

Another thing that threatens the people of Ukraine is uncontrolled distribution of weapons by radicals and the authorities to all those who are ready to grab them, including criminals that have been released from prisons. Those guns already shoot in the hands of burglars and plunderers. Numerous proofs of that can be easily found on social media. Those are posted by the dwellers of Kyiv and other cities. This demonstrates the irresponsible approach of the Ukrainian authorities to its citizens.

Today we witness an information war on Russia in social media. Since there are no proofs that the Russian military forces destroy civilian infrastructure, Ukrainian strikes and occasional hits are presented as such, as well as photo and video footage from Donbas that again depict crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists. Besides, in social media one can easily find tutorials no shooting fakes that should defile our special operation. All in all, there are 1.2 million such fakes in Ukrainian social media.

I would like to assure your readers that Russia did its best to preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. We organised many meetings of the UN Security Council, under the Arria formula, constructively participated in negotiations in the framework of the Normandy Format and the Contact Group in Minsk, discussed the situation in eastern Ukraine in the OSCE. This is despite the fact that Russia has never been a party to the Minsk process.

It is precisely because of Kyiv’s reluctance to take into account the interests of broad sectors of the population that Ukraine has been at war since 2014 with its citizens, who disagree with the values of Maidan and the current policy of the Ukrainian authorities. With massive support from the West, the Ukrainian authorities turned Ukraine into a breeding ground for Nazi ideology.

We are not closing the doors for talks. We are ready to engage in dialogue: to state our position and to listen to what other States are saying. But, this dialogue must be mutually respectful. Unfortunately, we are not seeing that now. For example, Russia’s attempts to initiate a dialogue on guarantees of the security of our country and to strengthen the defense capability on our territory are perceived by the alliance as aggressive behavior.