Lavrov Warns Ukraine’s ‘Crimea Platform’ Is a Western ‘Coven’ To Groom Neo-Nazi Policies

Aug. 24 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky officially launched the “Crimea Platform summit” in Kiev, described as an aggressive effort to mobilize international support for Ukraine regaining control of Crimea and Sevastopol from Russia, which it accuses of illegally annexing in 2014. According to Euronews and AP, representatives of 46 countries, including 30 NATO members, attended, many of them foreign or defense ministers. In his inaugural speech, Zelensky vowed that he would do “everything possible to return Crimea,” so that it, with Ukraine, “becomes part of Europe.” First announced by Zelensky in September 2020, his initiative was postponed twice, because it wasn’t clear what international support it would get.

Charging that Russia has fully militarized Crimea, and transformed it “into a territory where the most basic rights and freedoms of humans are regularly violated,” Zelensky warned attendees that Russia’s alleged occupation of Crimea called into question the “efficiency of the whole international security system, principles of territorial integrity and inviolability of borders. Without restoration of confidence any country couldn't be sure if its territory would not be occupied,” he proclaimed. The “international community” must respond, he demanded. “We want to see the active efforts of our Western partners!” Charles Michel, president of the European Council, blathered about the EU’s “unwavering” determination not to recognize Russia’s “illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov minced no words in calling the event by its right name. In visiting Sudak, Crimea on Aug. 11, Lavrov stated, “Another coven will take place in a week, the Crimean Platform meeting, where the West will continue to foster the neo-Nazi and racist attitudes of the current Ukrainian authorities,” TASS quoted him as saying. And in an interview with the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, published Aug. 23, Lavrov identified that “On July 21, Vladimir Zelensky signed a discriminatory law, ‘On the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine.’ Along with the previously adopted laws on the state language and on education, the new legislation seriously infringes on the interests of Russians, Hungarians and other peoples historically living in various regions of modern Ukraine. In fact, we are witnessing an artificial division of the country’s population into categories with different sets of rights, which is very similar to the theory and practice used by Nazi Germany.”

Today, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the foreign involvement in the Crimean Platform:

“The stated aim of this political project, developed with active involvement of government experts from the United States, the U.K. and the European Union and funded by the United States Agency for International Development, is ‘the de-occupation of Crimea and its reintegration with Ukraine.’

“The participants involved are just right for this goal—mainly being NATO countries and some international organizations sharing a common delusion that the Crimean Peninsula should be part of the current Ukrainian state and that it can be torn away from the Russian Federation....

“The matter of Crimea’s reunification with the Russian Federation was settled in March 2014. This hard-won decision was made by the local residents themselves in a referendum that followed the unconstitutional coup d'état in Kiev in February 2014. This way Crimeans could remain true to their history, to their Russian culture, the right to speak their native languages, including Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar, and at the same time avoid the dangers of the punitive operation and civil war, which was later unleashed by the Kiev regime in Donbas....”