Crimea
Thursday 28 March 2024
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“The mercenaries who have been actively recruited since the beginning of the special operation have mostly been liquidated. More than 5,800 militants were eliminated, including... 466 from the United States of America...”
Reports suggest Russia has vastly exaggerated the number of U.S. citizens who died fighting in Ukraine, largely as volunteers, not mercenaries. -
“We proceed from the fact that all people are equal, all people have the same rights; the rights and freedoms of one country and one nation end where the rights and freedoms of another person of an entire state appear."
Russia is Europe’s last colonial empire, denying equal rights and the right to self-determination to indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities. -
“The politician [Umerov] has played an active role in spreading blatant propaganda about the alleged mistreatment of the Crimean Tatar community by Russia in Crimea – claims that Crimean Tatar leaders actually living in the peninsula have repeatedly debunked.”
Russia’s oppression of the Crimean Tatars and systematic persecution of their leaders is well documented. -
“They are throwing [Ukrainian soldiers] on our minefields, under our artillery fire, acting as if they are not their own citizens at all. It is astonishing.”
Unlike Russia’s winter offensive, which saw the use of “human wave attacks,” the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive has reflected a desire to stem combat casualties. -
“You know those actually inflated stories about child abduction. We explain it simply: there was no kidnapping; there was an attempt and specific actions aimed at saving the children, who were taken out of the war zone.”
The Russian government is involved in forcibly deporting thousands of Ukrainian children, submitting them to Russification programs and preventing their return to Ukraine. -
“The planning of strikes with precision weapons against military and terrorist infrastructure facilities of the Kiev regime is carried out on the basis of information carefully checked and confirmed through several channels, knowingly excluding the civilian facilities, as well as cultural and historical heritage sites.”
Russia’s serial strikes on Odesa have repeatedly hammered civilians and damaged a cathedral that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. -
“The Foreign Ministry strongly condemns the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge, which is a purely civilian facility.”
The Russian military began using the Crimean Bridge after it was opened for automobile traffic in 2018. Since February 2022, the bridge has become the Russian military’s main transport corridor for troops heading to southern Ukraine. -
“…the Russian military infrastructure has never moved toward Western Europe...”
The Russian Federation has been aggressively expanding its military presence toward Western Europe, including by waging a war in Ukraine and deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. -
“U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan ordered Ukraine to hit Crimea.”
Jake Sullivan did not order Ukraine to strike Crimea in his interview with CNN; he reaffirmed the U.S. position that Crimea is part of Ukraine. -
“These kids are already in Russia. These are children from those regions that have recognized themselves as Russia.”
Lvova-Belova flipped reality on its head, claiming Russia was saving the very children it was bombing, further subjecting them to family separation, militarization, and alleged cultural erasure. -
"The tragedy that is taking place in Donbas also concerns our very small citizens, children."
The children are citizens of Ukraine, not Russia. The Russian government-sponsored deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption by Russian families is a war crime and an act of genocide under international law. -
“Ukraine … remained the most faithful to the pro-American course, which ultimately made it the poorest country in Europe.”
Ukraine cooperated politically with both the West and Russia, and Russia was its largest economic partner until 2019. The pro-Western former Soviet republics are today richer than Russia.