ST.PETERSBURG, June 16. /TASS/. It’s difficult to predict that fate of Ukrainian territories controlled by Kiev given the policy pursued by "this blatant neo-Nazi regime," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told TASS on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
Answering a question what facts Russia had amid the statements that Poland is beginning certain steps on colonizing Ukraine’s territory and that Hungary and Romania could take part in this division, Lavrov said that during the visit of Polish President Andrzej Duda, Ukraine made a decision giving the Poles the same rights as the Ukrainians, except for the voting right.
"No one considers this is wrong. For all these years, the West has been whipping up hysteria that we made a decision to issue Russian passports to the citizens of Donbass. The West got hysterical and did not mention at all that this practice has been used for long in Poland and Romania," Lavrov stressed.
"In Ukraine’s Chernovitskaya region, more than half of population are Romanian citizens. Programs are being implemented there on developing cross-border ties, which are financed by Bucharest. This is nearly the same what we did when we hoped for the implementation of the Minsk agreements as we were fostering economic ties with Donbass in the conditions when Kiev declared total economic, transport and other blockades against these two republics," Russia’s top diplomat noted.
"Romania has been doing this for a long time by developing humanitarian contacts. And no one has any negative tone about this. This is considered as normal because they are NATO members, the respected people, they can do whatever they want, they have their own rules," he went on to say. "I cannot now imagine the fate of this Ukraine, given the policy carried out by this blatant neo-Nazi regime."
"If the Ukrainian regime had not staged a total attack against the Russians … and had fulfilled the Minsk agreements, the key idea of which is a special status that is mainly based on the right to speak a native language, nothing would have happened. We were ready to develop relations in the framework of implementing the Minsk agreements. They refused to do this," he noted.