UNITED NATIONS, April 17, /ITAR-TASS/. Reckless moves by the Ukrainian authorities who had launched a military operation in the east of the country were fraught with a danger of a civil war in Ukraine, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told a session of the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
Those who usurped power in Kiev as a result of a coup, have now embarked on the course towards ignoring legal demands of the people of the south-east and anti-constitutionally using armed forces for quelling their own people, blasphemously dubbing them as bandits and terrorists, he said.
The Russian envoy also criticized the report on the situation with human rights in Ukraine, published in Geneva on Tuesday, calling it one-sided and politicized. According to Churkin, the document failed to pay due attention to the problem of growing nationalistic moods and said nothing about appeals to ethnic hatred.
Meeting in Geneva
Also Churkin said that a four-party meeting in Geneva on the settlement in Ukraine with participation of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union remained on the agenda.
Churkin said the talks were to discuss ways out of the crisis in Ukraine. According to him, the working out of a ‘deeply reformed constitution’ on the basis of a dialogue on equal terms of all without exception regions and political forces would be a recipe for the settlement.
He said this issue would be in the focus of attention at the Geneva talks.
“This also must be the main task of the international community when it expresses concern about the developments in Ukraine,” the diplomat said, adding that the constitutional reform should be real and not cosmetic.
It was reported earlier that taking part in the Geneva talks would be foreign ministers, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ukraine’s acting Foreign Minister Andrei Deshchitsa.
Churkin, has dubbed as “lies and a rude provocation” assertions that the Crimean Tatars were facing the threat of genocide.
The Crimean Tatar language
The diplomat reminded a session of the UN Security Council that in accordance with the Crimean Constitution, the Crimean Tatar language was fixed as a third official language, along with Russian and Ukrainian.
“High positions in all ministries and departments of Crimea have been secured for representatives of the Tatar Crimean population, which never happened before,” Churkin said.
He also said that social, economic and other problems of the Tatar population of Crimea would be settled not only by the Russian leadership, but in teamwork with Tatarstan - one of the biggest, most powerful and successful regions of the Russian Federation. The diplomat said the leadership of the Russian Federation and Tatarstan had already agreed on joint activity.
At a session of the UN Security Council, Ukraine’s envoy Yuriy Sergeyev maintained that Tatars and Ukrainians were at the moment as the most vulnerable communities in Crimea. He said many of them had had to leave their houses for safety reasons and because their rights and freedoms were infringed upon. “Tatar leaders see this situation as a third act of genocide against their ethnic group in the past century,” he said.
Speaking after his Ukrainian colleague, Vitaly Churkin made reservations immediately that Russia would not discuss the situation in Crimea at the Security Council, at least not under the heading ‘situation in Ukraine’. However, he said he could not leave unnoticed such an open provocation from the Ukrainian side.
Use of nationalist and extremist forces
Vitaly Churkin also warned against the use of nationalist and extremist forces for time-serving interests, saying that conniving at them could lead to grave consequences.
He said political forces professing nationalistic or sometimes extremist ideas could not be used for time-serving interests, while the policy of conciliation could lead to gravest, destructive aftermath.
He reminded the audience that late in March, an international conference against genocide was held in Brussels, which pointed to a need to protect and encourage fundamental rights of the minorities irrespective of their nationality, ethnic origin, race or belief.
“We call on all countries for efficient international and regional cooperation for achieving these goals in accordance with the UN Charter,” Churkin noted.
Over the past few weeks, the problem of growing nationalistic moods is constantly raised in connection with the situation in Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly warned about raging of radical activists in the country, appealing for measures against them, but the West, including the United States, categorically dismisses the existence of the problem.