Crimea will never return to Ukraine, Sergey Aksyonov, the head of Crimea, said in response to a European Parliament’s resolution passed on Thursday.
“No one is going to return Crimea to Ukraine. We have already returned to our historical homeland. This is our final choice, which needs no revision. No decisions made by European Parliaments will change that,” Aksyonov’s press service quoted him as saying.
Aksyonov believes that Europe is fulfilling a political order from overseas when it adopts such documents.
“There is no point in paying attention to these inadequate resolutions. The inhabitants of Crimea have got used to this kind of statements and are not surprised when European politicians take black for white. It’s getting more funny to listen to this pack of lies,” Aksyonov added.
Earlier on Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution, which links the lifting of the anti-Russian sanctions imposed after Crimea’s reunification with Russia to the peninsula’s return to Ukraine. The European deputies repeated that the European Union considered Crimea’s reunification with Russia to be illegitimate.
The restoration of Ukraine’s control over the peninsula is one of the conditions necessary for resuming cooperation with Russia, including the lifting of the existing sanctions, the European Parliament’s resolution said.
**** EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT PASSES RESOLUTION ON CRIMEA~
European parliament’s resolution on Crimea does not leave space for dialogue with Russia, Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of foreign policy committee in the upper house of Russian parliament said on Thursday.
“The European Parliament has passed a resolution on Crimea and naturally the one marked by categorical overtones that leave no space for dialogue,” he wrote on his page in Facebook on Thursday.
Besides, the document passed by the MEPs says cooperation will be resumed exclusively on the condition of Crimea’s “return” to Ukraine, Kosachev indicated.
“Which probably means never?” he asked with a rhetoric emphasis. “Reading such bellicose resolutions makes sense only by way of regular monitoring of the current situation at European organizations.”
Kosachev believes the manifestation of “tender care for the rights of ethnic groups and minorities in Crimea and the appeals to Russia as an ‘occupationist power’ to ensure the guarantees of multicultural development of the ethnic groups and minorities living on the peninsula and full respect for the Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar and other cultures and languages” look particularly insincere now that the Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages have received an absolutely equal status.
“That’s something the minorities just couldn’t get in Ukraine,” Kosachev said.
“A logical question arises then, namely, who is the occupationist power in this particular case?” he said. “And where were you, dear European counterparts, a couple of decades ago when we would tell you about the mass encroachments on the rights of non-Ukrainians in Crimea and not only there? Where were your values and principles then?”
The appropriate parties for discussing the rights of citizens of any ethnic identity in Crimea are the Crimeans themselves.
“You call in your resolution to respect the free and sovereign choice of the Crimeans to walk down the European pathway, but please respect the Crimeans’ choice not to go to Europe together with those who never asked them where to go,” he said.
European Parliament adopted a resolution on Thursday where it ties up the lifting of sanctions, which the West introduced against Russia after Crimea’s reunification, to the handover of the peninsula to Ukraine.
The MEPs recalled that the EU considers Crimea’s transition to Russia to be illegal and they say the restoration of Ukraine’s control over the peninsula is one of the mandatory conditions for the resumption of relations with Russia and the lifting of sanctions.
