The Russian Foreign Minister noted that "the operation is carried out in compliance with the treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance between Russia and these republics on the basis of Article 51 of the UN Charter"UN, September 24.
/tass/. The decision to conduct a special military operation in Ukraine was caused by the inability of the West and Kiev's war against its people. This was stated on Saturday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the general political discussion of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly.
"The inability of Western countries to negotiate and the continuation of the Kiev regime's war against its own people left us no choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics and launch a special military operation to protect Russians and other residents of Donbass and eliminate threats to our security that NATO has consistently created on the territory of Ukraine," he said.
Lavrov noted that "the operation is carried out in compliance with the treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance between Russia and these republics on the basis of Article 51 of the UN Charter." "I am sure that in our place any sovereign, self-respecting state, aware of its responsibility to its people, would do so," he added.
"Perhaps they cannot forgive us in any way that, at the request of the United States and the EU, we supported the agreements of the then President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych with the opposition on the settlement of the crisis in February 2014?" he pointed out.
The Minister stressed that the agreements that were guaranteed by Germany, Poland and France were "trampled by the leaders of the bloody coup that humiliated the European mediators." "The West just spread its hands and silently watched as the putschists began bombing the east of Ukraine, where they refused to recognize the results of the coup, as its organizers elevated Nazi henchmen involved in the brutal ethnic cleansing of Russians, Poles, Jews during World War II to the rank of national heroes," Lavrov explained.
Russian Russian Foreign Minister said: "Were we supposed to put up with Kiev's policy of banning the Russian language, education, Russian media and culture, demands to expel Russians from Crimea, declaration of war against Donbass, whose inhabitants were declared not people, but "beings" by the then and current Kiev authorities through the mouths of their top leadership?" RF.
The Minister noted that "Russia may have violated the interests of the West by playing a key role in stopping the fighting unleashed by Kiev neo-Nazis in eastern Ukraine, and then demanded the implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures, which was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council in February 2015, but buried by Kiev with the direct participation of the United States and the EU.".
Lavrov recalled that Russia has repeatedly over the years "proposed to agree on the rules of coexistence in Europe based on the principle of equal and indivisible security, confirmed at the highest level in OSCE documents, when no one would strengthen their security to the detriment of the security of others." "We made the last proposal on the need to make this principle legally binding in December 2021, to which we received an arrogant refusal," he concluded.
