MOSCOW, April 14 (RIA Novosti) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has criticized the United States and European countries for attempting to blame Moscow for events in southeastern Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Monday.
“Lavrov has strongly rejected the well-known attempts by the US and a number of European countries to place the responsibility of the events [in Ukraine] on Russia,” the statement said.
In a phone conversation with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius, Lavrov stressed the need to immediately curb Kiev’s provocative escalation of the critically-heated situation in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine.
The Russian foreign minister also called on Paris, a guarantor of an earlier EU-brokered reconciliation agreement, to prevent the Kiev regime from using force against protesters in Slaviansk and other Ukrainian towns.
Russian UN envoy Vitaly Churkin called on the international community Monday to demand that Ukrainian authorities halt violent moves in the crisis-hit country that could lead to civil war.
Rallies in support of federalization have been rocking the country since last month, with activists in Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv occupying regional government buildings to put pressure on the country’s coup-imposed regime.
On Saturday, the protests spilled over to numerous towns and cities across Ukraine’s eastern province of Donetsk, including Slaviansk, Mariupol, Yenakiyevo, and Kramatorsk.
