Comment by the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Alexander Lukashevich, regarding the statement of the representative of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs about Russians in Ukraine

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted the statement of the representative of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs made at the briefing of the 17 March, where he provided a strange, illogical and legally ignorant argumentation, which disputed the legitimacy of the referendum in Crimea.

According to his words, the right to self-determination "refers to indigenous people". Only four indigenous ethnic groups, including Ukrainians, live in the territory of Ukraine, and Russians are not among them. To support his words, for some reason,the representative referred to articles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Unfortunately we are forced to state that Ukrainian "specialists" openly distort norms of international law, interpreting them at will. The right of people to self-determination is stated in the International Covenant on Human Rights and is not related to the establishment of the status of one or another people as an indigenous people.

We would also like to mention that the UN Declaration specifically highlights that "nothing in this Declaration may be used to deny any peoples their right to self-determination..."

If this statement means that by calling Russians a "diaspora", pointing out their subordinate position with regard to the "indigenous" Ukrainian population of the country, then the investigations of "ethnographers" from Mikhailovsky Square highly resemble the searches of the last century by theorists of Nazism in the 1930's. It seems at least inadequate to propose arbitrarily distorted interpretations of the origin of people, who by some quirk of fate, became related to different geographic parts of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs makes a serious mistake, when in this critical situation they hit at the historical memories of millions and millions of Russians and Ukrainians, who have been living together for ages and have made a big joint contribution to the establishment and welfare of historical and modern Ukraine.

19 March 2014