MOSCOW, August 27 (RIA Novosti) -The West does not want to take notice of the large-scale violation of human rights by Ukrainian troops and other pro-Kiev forces, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s special representative for human rights, Konstantin Dolgov said Wednesday.
“We are still being surprised by the one-sided and politically loaded assessment of the state of human rights and the humanitarian situation in Ukraine, particularly in its southeast, coming from various European capitals, as well as from certain international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They persistently do not want to notice the real scale of mass human rights violations, carried out by Ukrainian forces and Kiev-controlled military organizations,” Dolgov said in a statement published on the Russian Foreign Ministry website.
“In this dramatic context, the European Union, Washington and the headquarters of certain prominent human rights NGOs are shedding ‘crocodile tears’ over the alleged violations of international humanitarian law by the self-defense forces,” Dolgov noted.
“Kiev’s crackdown on the…blocking of Russian television channels and cynical fight against the dissidence, leading to the kidnapping and killings of journalists on a regular basis, is being ignored. The Kiev authorities still have not done anything to investigate the bloody crimes [committed in] Odessa and Mariupol in May and also the February’s sniper shootings in Kiev,” the Foreign Ministry’s Human Rights representative added.
Dolgov urged the West to “Apply pressure on Kiev in order to start improving the unacceptable human rights situation, the rule of law, and the disastrous humanitarian situation in southeastern Ukraine, the origins of which they [the West] have a direct relationship with.”
According to the Ukraine Situation No. 8 report released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on August 22, the fighting in eastern Ukraine had killed 2,249 and injured 6,033 as of August 19. At least 23 of those killed and 38 those wounded were children.
