MOSCOW, January 29. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has big questions for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres regarding his position on Ukraine, he said in an interview with Turkish media.

"These are major issues," the minister said. "The UN Secretariat and its senior officials have been clearly playing into the hands of those who want to keep Ukraine’s Nazi regime in power, even if this does not fall within the Secretary-General’s purview. He fails to perform his mandate as per Article 100 of the UN Charter which sets out that the Secretary-General must act in an impartial and neutral manner and that receiving instructions from any government is unacceptable."

Lavrov also noted an "interesting aspect" in the position of the UN Secretary General on Greenland, which, in particular, was outlined by his official representative, the head of the world organization, Stephane Dujarric. Lavrov said that the day after US President Donald Trump announced his plans for Greenland, Dujarric was asked at a press conference how he felt about this, where the UN secretary general stood on the matter. He replied that they believe that the issue should be resolved on the basis of international law, including respect for the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark and respect for the right to self-determination of the people of Greenland. Lavrov called this approach particularly noteworthy in the context of the Ukrainian crisis, because on this track the principle of respect for the right of peoples to self-determination is often ignored.

"We submitted a formal written question to Mr Guterres on whether only territorial integrity mattered in the UN Charter, while the right of nations to self-determination and other principles, including the sovereign equality of states, did not? They did everything to avoid answering this question by adopting an extremely sly posture, like a water snake, as we say here in Russia. They did everything to slip away by offering one clumsy reply after another," Lavrov continued.

"We have recently submitted yet another formal question to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and his team stating that if they have been saying in public that he and his senior executives at the UN recognise the right of the people of Greenland to self-determination, and if that it is up to the people of Greenland to decide on their own destiny instead of leaving it to someone else, does the United Nations recognize that people in Donbass, Novorossiya and, of course, Crimea, enjoy the same rights? Moreover, the West has been pointing to self-determination as the one and only major criteria for Kosovo’s independence. And the senior executives at the UN did not challenge this position. There were no referendums in Kosovo. They simply said that Kosovo was independent which constituted an affront for the people of Serbia and their history. But when Crimea held a referendum and complied with all the rules, the West said that the right to self-determination did not apply because the principle of territorial integrity had to prevail.

No one denied Albanians in Kosovo any rights. They could speak their language and they had their own Alban schools. Belgrade guaranteed that people in this historical part of the Serbian state could enjoy all their rights. As I have already said, the Ukrainians prohibited all this at the legislative level in Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya," the Russian foreign minister concluded.