Russia now describes Ukraine as a state that has no right to be sovereign.
Commenting on the UN Secretary António Guterres’s statement that the official recognition of the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic violates Ukraine’s sovereignty, Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov said on Feb 22 that the right to sovereignty is only applicable to countries representing the entire population. According to Lavrov, since 2014, Ukraine is not such a country.
To substantiate his claims, he used the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States, which “no has ever questioned,” according to Lavrov. He noted that the Declaration states that sovereignty and territorial integrity must be “strictly respected in relation to all states that act on the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and thus have a government that represents all people living in a given territory, regardless of race, religion and skin color”.
In Lavrov’s view, Ukraine does not qualify to be that state.
Repeating Russia’s official claims that the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, which led to the ousting of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, was a coup, he expressed an opinion that “the Ukrainian regime” does not represent the entire population. He also added that many regions defied such “an unconstitutional move” and “what happened in Crimea and eastern Ukraine shows that this regime was rejected by millions of Ukrainians at the time.”
Speaking with his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock in Berlin Wednesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed that Putin does not regard Ukraine to be an independent state. “President Putin in his speech (on Monday) declared in a sense the negation of Ukraine as a sovereign country.”
Both statements come after Russia’s official recognition of the puppet “republics” in eastern Ukraine and officialdeployment of its military in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The move has been condemned by most countries and has resulted in Germany putting a halt to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The U.S. and the U.K. have also imposed additional sanctions on Russia, targeting its key banks and oligarchs close to Putin.
