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Lavrov blasts West for covering up Kiev’s brutal blockade, slaughter of Donbass civilians

Tensions escalated along the line of contact in eastern Ukraine on the morning of February 17

MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. Over the past years, the Western press has covered up reports about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR respectively) and Ukraine’s blockade of Donbass, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

"All throughout these years, when the Ukrainian leadership evaded its obligations under the Minsk Accords, nationalists were openly wiping out civilian facilities, schools, hospitals. It was well-known and all facts were regularly reported by our mass media, but were swept under the rug by the Western media," Russia’s diplomacy chief specified.

"It included the slaughter of civilians and you may all know well that the death toll among the population exceeded 10,000," he noted. "No one in the West cared at all about the inhumane economic, trade, transportation or food blockade of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics."

Tensions escalated along the line of contact in eastern Ukraine on the morning of February 17. The self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR, LPR) reported the heaviest shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in months. On February 18, the heads of the LPR and DPR, Leonid Pasechnik and Denis Pushilin, announced the evacuation of the republics’ residents to Russia. A general mobilization was ordered in the Donbass republics on February 19.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on February 24 that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation in Ukraine in order to protect people "who have been suffering from abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years."

The Russian leader stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories and the operation was aimed at demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine.

When clarifying the developments unfolding, the Russian Defense Ministry reassured that Russian troops are not targeting Ukrainian cities, but are limited to surgically striking and incapacitating Ukrainian military infrastructure. There are no threats whatsoever to the civilian population.

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