Russian President Vladimir Putin said today that residents of eastern Ukraine, a war zone at the center of new tensions between the West and Moscow, were suffering from “Russophobia”, which is “a first step towards genocide”. ».
“I have to talk about Russophobia as a first step towards genocide. This is happening right now in Donbass (s.s. eastern Ukraine), we see it, we know it. “And that certainly resembles the genocide you talked about,” the Russian leader told a reporter.
This statement was made during a meeting of the Presidential Council on Human Rights.
Putin was responding to Russian journalist Kirill Vyshinsky, who had asked him to introduce the concepts of “genocide” and “incitement to genocide” into Russian law. The journalist, who was imprisoned in Ukraine in 2018 and 2019, said that “Russian-speakers and members of the Russian people” in Donbas live under “unbearable living conditions” and compared the situation in the region with the crimes committed in the Holocaust.
For the past seven years, the Donbass region has been the scene of clashes between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces. At least 13,000 people have been killed and the political settlement of the issue, as provided for in the 2015 Minsk agreements, is at an impasse.
Russia is considered the main military and financial backer of the rebels, although it denies it. Moscow and the Russian state media often accuse Kiev of inciting the war by pursuing a policy of discrimination against Russian-speakers, despite denials by Ukrainian authorities. In 2015, Putin had said that Kiev’s refusal to supply gas to separatist areas could be seen as “genocide.” Four years later, he argued that the recapture of these territories by Kiev could lead to a situation similar to the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia.
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