MOSCOW, March 20. /TASS/. The Russian Federation Council (upper chamber of the parliament) adopted the address of the Russian Federal Assembly (parliament) to the UN, parliaments of the world and inter-parliamentary organizations in regards to the 25th anniversary of the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, calling it to condemn this illegal military operation and bring the perpetrators to justice.
"Chambers of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation call on the United Nations, international parliamentary organizations and parliaments of foreign states to condemn the NATO military operation against Yugoslavia, to counter the attempts to distort the historic truth about the tragic events of 1999 in the interest of the collective West, to take measures to bring the NATO member states to international legal responsibility for its aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," the address says.
The lawmakers note that it is necessary to call things as they are, in this case a blatant violation of international law, "which led to the destabilization of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and negatively affected relations between European countries." The Federation Council and the State Duma expressed their deep concerns over the continued attempts to present the act of aggression against Yugoslavia as a peacekeeping operation to the international community, to forget the victims of NATO bombings, and to shift the responsibility for initiating the wars in the Balkans on the Serbs.
"Between March and June of 1999, NATO member states’ barbaric missile and bomb strikes against civilian infrastructure, including transportation and energy, as well as industrial enterprises, killed over 2,000 Yugoslavian civilians, including dozens of children. About 2,300 cruise missiles and 14,000 bombs were dropped on a small sovereign state in the middle of Europe," Russian lawmakers noted.
They also noted that NATO troops used depleted uranium munitions en masse, which caused irreparable damage to the environment and caused a rise in cancer cases in the region. Furthermore, it is still impossible to fully assess the scale of the ecological catastrophe, the document says.
The lawmakers believe that the impunity of NATO strikes at Yugoslavia created conditions for new force actions around the world under the guise of fighting "for values of freedom and democracy."
"The collective West’s conviction in own impunity and its right to decide the fates of other peoples and states has led to the nurturing of the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine, which, after the 2014 coup d’etat, embarked on a genocidal policy course against the Russian population and towards imitating an armed conflict in this country," the document says.