CARACAS, April 19. /TASS/. The West insists that the Kiev government forcibly return Crimea and Donbass under its control, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during his visit to Venezuela.

"How can one hope that the Kiev regime represents interests of Crimeans and residents of southeastern Ukraine - the territories that Western patrons demand to be returned by force by Kiev," Lavrov said at a press conference on Tuesday following talks with his Venezuelan counterpart Ivan Gil Pinto.

The Russian foreign minister went on to say that "in the long years that followed the creation of the UN, discussions continued on which principle of the UN Charter should have the priority: respect to sovereignty and territorial integrity or the nations’ right for self-determination." Eventually, after long years of debates, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, headlined ‘The Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States,’ Lavrov continued. Among other things, the document proclaims that every country must respect the principle of territorial integrity of any country whose government represents "the whole people belonging to the territory."

In this regard, Lavrov drew attention to the Kiev regime’s latest statements, in which government officials pledge to destroy Russian language and culture in Crimea if it is retaken, replacing it with Ukrainian and global culture.

"The goals and meaning of those demagogical statements are clear," he said. ‘We have spoken in favor of resolving the Ukrainian situation and all other conflicts <…> primarily on the basis of the UN Charter principles about sovereign equality of states and the principle of indivisible global security, when no country should enhance its security at the expense of others or create threats to whoever, and in accordance with the principle of refusal from illegitimate, unilateral economic measures, which our Western ‘partners’ are imposing on unprecedented scale.".