MOSCOW, July 7. /TASS/. Russia and Hungary both publicly advocate for defending the rights of their citizens in Ukraine and could coordinate their efforts to counter forced Ukrainianization and discrimination, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Hungarian Magyar Nemzet newspaper.
He pointed out that the Kiev regime, in violation of the Ukrainian Constitution and its international obligations to uphold human rights and protect national minorities, had adopted legislation aimed at completely erasing all traces of Russians in the country, with not only the Russian-speaking population but also "other ethnic groups, including Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Bulgarians, Armenians, Belarusians, and Greeks" subjected to forced Ukrainianization.
"Budapest is well aware of this. Today, Russia and Hungary both speak out openly in defense of their compatriots. We can unite our efforts in this area," Lavrov emphasized.
Hatred festering for over a decade
The Russian foreign minister noted that the campaign of persecution and elimination of Russians in Ukraine began immediately after the 2014 coup in Kiev. "The nationalists who took power threatened to ‘drown in blood’ Russian-speaking Crimea, which refused to recognize the coup’s outcome, and they dispatched so-called ‘friendship trains’ carrying neo-Nazi militants to the peninsula to carry out massacres," he recalled.
Lavrov also pointed to the tragic events in Odessa on May 2, 2014, stating that "activists who opposed the new authorities in Kiev were burned alive in the Trade Union House." He stressed that despite the identification of those responsible and the existence of extensive video footage, "none of the culprits has faced justice to this day."
"After 2014, Ukrainian forces killed more than 10,000 Russians and Russian-speaking civilians in Donbass — innocent people," Lavrov stressed.
Meanwhile, he noted that apart from what he described as "racism and Russophobia in Ukraine," there was another fundamental reason for the crisis. "A key root cause of the conflict was NATO’s relentless expansion eastward, aimed at turning Ukraine into a military stronghold to contain Russia," he said.