UNITED NATIONS, September 22. /TASS/. All those involved in war crimes in Ukraine, including Ukrainian top brass, officers and foreign mercenaries, will be held accountable for their deeds, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Thursday’s Ukraine-themed ministerial meeting of the UN Security Council.
"We have ample evidence of the Kiev regime’s criminal deeds that have been committed regularly since 2014," he said. "Russian law enforcers, in cooperation with their colleagues from the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, have been thoroughly documenting and investigating those crimes."
"They have established the involvement of over 220 individuals, including members of Ukraine’s supreme military command and troop commanders, who were responsible for shelling attacks against the civilian population," the Russian top diplomat continued. "Criminal cases against citizens of the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and the Netherlands, suspected of mercenarism and war crimes, are now being investigated. I assure you that all those guilty will be held accountable regardless of their citizenship."
The minister also expressed his "serious concern" over the fate of Russian servicemen captured by Ukrainian nationalists.
"There has been numerous evidence of ill-treatment, including extrajudicial killings in breach of the international humanitarian law," he said. "I’m convinced that those seeking truth about the events in Ukraine saw the video footage of Ukrainian nationalists killing Russian prisoners of war. They were knocked to the ground with hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head."
In this regard, the Russian top diplomat said that Western countries and their allies were persistently turning a blind eye to those crimes and were reluctant to comment on them.
More than 3,000 reports of crimes committed against residents of Donbass have been sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands, but they were ignored, Lavrov told.
"More than 3,000 reports of crimes committed against residents of Donbass have been sent to the International Criminal Court, but there was no reaction," he said.
"We have noted the increased attention, currently being paid by the international justice to events in Ukraine. Some sort of effort to investigate crimes in Ukraine, blamed on Russian servicemen, is now being promoted. All of this is reminiscent of a frame-up, and we can see it through perfectly well," Russia’s top diplomat added.
The minister reiterated that the court offered "no coherent reaction" to the violent state coup in Ukraine in 2014, to the Kiev government’s numerous shelling attacks targeting peaceful cities of Donbass, to the June 2, 2014, aerial bombing of Lugansk by Ukrainian military planes and to many other facts.
"They have lost our trust. For eight long years, we had been waiting for an effort against impunity in Ukraine to eventually begin, and we no longer count on justice to be served by this international institution, as well as by a whole range of others," Lavrov said. "The period of waiting is now over.".