MOSCOW, July 29 (RIA Novosti) – The recent UN report about the humanitarian situation in Ukraine is nonobjective, hypocritical and lacks the main message: the call to end the Kiev government’s military operation in eastern Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
“We have carefully studied the latest, already the fourth, report released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and based on information prepared by the UN monitoring mission on human rights in Ukraine. The main conclusion [is] that the report is non-objective and even hypocritical. Its key message is that the government of Ukraine is permitted to legitimately use force in order to restore law and order in the east of the country. It de-facto justifies the punitive operation,” ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said in a statement.
“The report lacks its main part: the demand to end the punitive operation that the Kiev government conducts against its own people. Without this, speaking about human rights in Ukraine makes no sense,” the statement read.
The UN report distorts facts, Lukashevich said.
“For example, it states that Kiev launched its military campaign in response to self-defense forces actions. In that regard, we would like to recall that the locals took up arms to protect themselves and their families from ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, including the hired ones,” Lukashevich noted.
In addition, according to Lukashevich, "the report did not find a place to document that the Ukrainian Army and radicals from the National Guard at least four times have used Grad multiple-launch rocket systems, killing 16 people and injuring a large number of civilians ... "
The United Nations did not report the cases of detentions and beatings of Russian journalists from Zvezda and Lifenews television networks, Lukashevich added.
"We find it cynical to state that the two Russian VGTRK [All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company] journalists … could have been killed both by Ukrainian soldiers and militia," the spokesman said.
On Monday, the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report documenting human right violations in Ukraine covering the period of June 8 to July 15. The report said that both pro-Kiev forces and militia were violating international humanitarian law and employing the use of heavy weaponry, which led to an increase in civilian casualties.
According to UN, the armed independence forces controlling the eastern regions of Ukraine continue to abduct, detain, torture and execute people kept as hostages in order to intimidate and “to exercise their power over the population in raw and brutal ways.” The report said that more than 1,100 people have been killed in the Ukrainian conflict since mid-April and more than 100,000 others have fled the conflict zone.
