MOSCOW, March 20./TASS/. The Russian State Duma adopted at its plenary session an appeal by the two houses of the Federal Assembly to the UN and parliamentarians worldwide in connection with the 25-year anniversary of NATO bombing the territory of sovereign Yugoslavia.
In the appeal, the parliamentarians call to condemn the military operation and take measures to bring NATO member states to international responsibility.
"The houses of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation appeal to the United Nations, international parliamentary organizations and parliaments of foreign countries to condemn the military operation of NATO countries against Yugoslavia, to counter attempts to distort the historical truth about the tragic events of 1999 in the interests of the collective West, to take measures to bring the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to international legal responsibility for the aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," the appeal said.
The parliamentarians emphasized the importance of giving a fair assessment of the flagrant violation of the rules of international law. The Russian parliament "expresses deep concern at the continuing attempts by the collective West to pass off to the global community the act of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a peacekeeping operation, to bury in oblivion the victims of the NATO bombardments, and to blame the Serbs for unleashing wars in the Balkans," the statement reads.
It points out that 2,000 Yugoslav civilians with children among them were killed between March and June 1999 in missile and bomb attacks by NATO forces on civilian infrastructure. "The troops of NATO member states used massive amounts of depleted uranium munitions, which caused irreparable damage to the environment and triggered a surge in the number of cancer cases in the region," it said.
"Impunity of NATO’s strikes on Yugoslavia has created the preconditions for new actions with the use of force across the globe, disguised as the struggle ‘for the values of freedom and democracy’," it went on to say.
"The conviction of the collective West in its infallibility and its right to decide the future of other peoples and states brought up the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine, which, after the coup in 2014, embarked on a genocidal course against the Russian population unleashing an armed conflict on the territory of this country," the Russian parliamentarians noted.
Earlier on Wednesday, the appeal in connection with the 25th anniversary of NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia was adopted at a plenary session by the Federation Council upper house of parliament.