MOSCOW, November 15. /TASS/. Head of Russia’s Federation Council (upper house) International Affairs Committee, Konstantin Kosachev, has described the resolution on Crimea passed by the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee as cynical and mean games and an attempt to force through international documents Ukraine’s approach towards the issue.
On Tuesday, the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee passed a resolution by a majority of votes condemning human rights violations allegedly taking place in Crimea and calling Russia "an occupying power." A total of 71 countries, including the EU member-countries, Canada and the US, voted for the resolution passed by the UN General Assembly for the first time last year. Twenty-five countries, among them India, Iran, China, Syria and South Africa, voted against it, while 77 delegations abstained.
"These cynical and mean games around Crimea, which have no other content than Kiev’s phantom malevolence and the current Russophobic campaigns in the West, reflect the only desire, which is not helping Crimea residents but taking revenge on them and Russia," Kosachev wrote on Facebook on Wednesday.
In his view, the resolution titled "Situation of human rights in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (Ukraine)," is fundamentally unrealistic, as such territorial entities no longer exist. "This is another openly hypocritical attempt to force through international documents Ukraine’s approach towards the ‘occupation,’ ‘annexation’ and so on under the guise of concern for human rights," Kosachev noted.
He added that, if all that was not presented under the pretense of concern for human rights, the document would never end up in the Third Committee, "which oversees humanitarian issues, and would not be supported by the majority its members who, as is known, votes more actively for human rights dossiers, often just failing to notice the main purpose of such documents."
Kiev’s discriminatory moves
"The cynicism of the situation is that the resolution on the rights of Crimean residents was initiated by Ukraine, which indulged in the discrimination of Crimea’s Russian-speaking population on ethnic grounds prior to 2014 and after that restricted the peninsula residents’ access to water and power, organized the transport and trade blockades backed by Western countries," Kosachev stressed.
He noted that the resolution refers to Ukraine as a country "showing a touching concern for the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian population of the peninsula that doesn’t belong to it." The senator also noted that Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) recently passed "a nationalist law on instruction in the Ukrainian language, which gave rise to indignation in the neighboring countries." "I don’t know, perhaps, we have overlooked the fact that, at some point, a strange notion had been added to the list of European values, according to which restricting people’s access to essential utilities and outright blackmail means taking care of people’s rights? Isn’t it high time to make the actions by Ukraine and the West against Crimea a separate dossier for the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee? That’s where numerous real facts are guaranteed instead of imaginary ones," Kosachev concluded.