MOSCOW, February 20. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia wonders why the global community is in no hurry to somehow react to some evident neo-Nazi slogans of Ukrainian radical protesters, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday.
“We have turned the attention of journalists and international politicians to the fact that there has been no reaction from the global community to the slogans some radicals chant in Ukraine,” he said. “They are clearly neo-Nazi.”
“Swastika signs appear not only on a number of buildings but also inside them,” the diplomat said. “Yet there is no adequate response to ‘the smell of anti-Semitism’, noticed by some international Jewish organizations.”
“The ‘brown plague’ is a phenomenon we once banished together, and we do not want it to reappear in new forms,” he said.
Lukashevich noted the settlement of Ukraine’s political crisis would be achieved by measures deemed expedient by the legitimate power.
He said Russia and Ukraine maintained contacts at different levels.
“There are plans to continue economic cooperation. They are also being discussed”, the diplomat said, referring to the current visit of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin to Kiev.
Fighting extremism
Russia calls on Ukraine’s government and opposition to pool efforts against extremists inciting a civil war, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Mahmud Zebari said on Thursday.
“We believe that Ukrainians should sort everything out within their constitutional field and without proposals being dictated to receive this or that mission. Most often they come without any invitation,” he said. “All external players as well as the Ukrainian opposition should urgently and decisively dissociate themselves from extremists and other radicals.”
“It is high time to stop using Ukraine as a small coin in a geopolitical game, put forward different ideas and calls to the Ukrainian authorities formulated as “who is not with us, is against us,” Lavrov said. “We call on the authorities and the opposition to agree on how to pool their efforts against extremists who are trying to instigate a war."
Meanwhile, opposition activists have raised a flag of Syrian terrorists near Ukraine’s national flag in Kiev’s central Independence Square.
Along with the Free Syrian Army flag, the flag of Ichkeria, or the flag of Chechen separatists, can be also seen in the Independence Square.