MOSCOW, July 7. /TASS/. The European Union has abandoned its declared European values when, during the Baltic States' accession, it ignored human rights violations there, Konstantin Kosachev, deputy chairman of the Federation Council, said in an interview with TASS.
This is the reason for Europe's current silence on what is happening in Ukraine.
"The so-called united Europe, forgive me for saying that, has lost its virginity with its European values. It lost it once, and that was the end of it," the senator remarked. "It all started with the three Baltic states."
Kosachev said that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were the first of the post-Soviet countries to be in the orbit of the EU and NATO, but "even then they acted in exactly the opposite way to what is commonly called ‘European values.’
"Where is the respect for human rights, where is the respect for the rights of national minorities, where is the respect for various faiths, where is the honest attitude to one's own history and the rejection of its falsification? None of this happened in the Baltic States at the time of their admission to the European Union," the senator said.
Europe "solely for opportunistic reasons turned a blind eye" to this and made a radical mistake, the politician believes.
"Because when the same thing that the Balts were doing began to happen on an immeasurably large scale (both quantitatively and qualitatively) in Ukraine, Europe had no opportunity to object. They've already turned a blind eye to it once. And having turned a blind eye to it once, they were forced to pretend later that everything was fine: they could ban the Russian language in Ukraine, they could persecute the church in Ukraine, they could declare the Nazis national heroes. From the point of view of the silence of the ‘European lambs,’ what is happening in Ukraine now originates there, in the 1990s, when having lied once, who will believe you?" Kosachev concluded.