The European Union is distancing from Russia while overlooking the violations of the rights of Russian-speaking residents and discrimination against the Russian culture in the Baltic states, Ukraine and other countries, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th February, 2021) The European Union is distancing from Russia while overlooking the violations of the rights of Russian-speaking residents and discrimination against the Russian culture in the Baltic states, Ukraine and other countries, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
Lavrov made this statement at a joint press conference after the meeting with Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto held in St. Petersburg, during which the sides discussed a wide range of issues, from human rights in Russia to European security.
"When Russian-language channels are shut down, when criminal cases are brought against journalists just for doing their job, when the shameful phenomenon of statelessness persists in the European Union, and the European Union looks on without any particular desire to change anything, I think that this is not a distance of Russia from the European Union, but a distance of the European Union itself from the Russian language, Russian culture, from everything Russian, and therefore from the Russian Federation," Lavrov said.
The minister added that Russia could not neglect the failure of the EU to ensure the rights of the Russian population of its member states and neighboring countries.
"Of course, we cannot ignore the connivance of the European Union with regard to gross violations of the rights of Russian speaking, Russians and the attacks on the Russian language and Russian culture that we see in the Baltic States, Ukraine, and a number of other countries," Lavrov said.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, countries like Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia began pursuing various forms of discrimination against their Russian-speaking citizens. Estonia and Latvia did not grant their ethnic Russian residents citizenship, instead of giving them alien or non-citizen passports. In Latvia, where Russian is the mother tongue of 40 percent of the population, it has no legal status and is considered a foreign language. Ukraine has purged the Russian language from its airwaves and, in 2017, passed a law curtailing the use of minority languages, including Russian, in schools by the end of 2020.
