VIENNA, May 6 (RIA Novosti) – The Ukrainian authorities must rescind their order to use the army and national guard against civilians in the country’s southeast in order to de-escalate the crisis in the country, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday.
“In regard to the de-escalation, I have already said, that the first and obvious step must be changing the order to use the army and National Guard to quash protests. I quoted to you the statement of the NATO defense ministers, who in February of this year demanded that the army not be used in the political process and demanded that the army observed neutrality. That’s the way it was when the legitimate current president was Viktor Yanukovych,” Lavrov said.
Meanwhile, Western officials including in the EU are making statements that Kiev “has every right to use the army for carrying out the so-called counterterrorism operation and that all this is justified because a state has monopoly on the use of force,” Lavrov said.
These two statements are completely opposed, he said.
“In a situation when the army has been ordered to wage a war against the people, I think, cancelling of this order would be the next obvious step to start the de-escalation,” Lavrov said.
Despite Kiev’s promises to lay down arms, attacks on pro-federalization protesters have continued. Last Friday saw the bloodiest violence since the country’s regime change in February. The highest casualty toll was reported in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa, where at least 46 people died and over 200 were injured.
Moscow has described Kiev’s actions as a punitive operation that is destroying any remaining hope for the implementation of the Geneva accords.
