Speaking at the plenary session on behalf of the United Russia faction, First Deputy
Chairman of the Committee on CIS Affairs and Contacts with Fellow Countryman
Konstantin Zatulin
Konstantin Fedorovich
criticized the anti-Russian policy of the current Ukrainian authority,
saying that today Ukraine has essentially become a terrorist state. According
to him, it is necessary to take measures to protect the Russian population
living in this country.
First of all, the parliamentarian recalled the tragic death of the head of the Donetsk People's Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, who was killed in Donetsk on August 31. “During the four years of the civil war unleashed by the organizers of the coup d'état, we have seen allandmuch, muchmorein Ukraine, yet this terrorist act on August 31 stands out for its cynicism,” he stated.
According to Konstantin Zatulin, claiming a place among European states, to achieve its goalsUkraine has resorted to terrorist actsnot for the first time. “Ukraine has become a terrorist state. And the heads of today's Ukraine are smeared with the blood of Alexander Zakharchenko and many other sons and daughters of Donbass from head to toe. They are promoting themselves against this background, depriving each other of the disgraceful glory of the leaders of the massacre,”said the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee.
The parliamentarian believes that President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko conveniently declared on denunciationthe Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, ratified in 1999, almost at the same time.
“The President of Ukraine did this because the current heads of Ukraine do not even want a hint of friendship, cooperation and partnership, the very word that it is possible to be friends, cooperate and partner with Russia,” said Konstantin Zatulin. “They per se run the course of turning Ukraine into not just an anti-Russian state butinto a state that opposes the Russian nation as a whole, it is an inevitable consequence of the desire to consolidate Ukraine on anti-Russian grounds.”he continued
In recent years, the members of the Verkhovna Rada, one after another, are adopting laws against the Russian language, the Russian people and attitudes towards Russia, stressed Konstantin Zatulin.
He reminded that in September last year a law on educationwas adopted. According to this law Russian education or education in Russian, as well as in the language of other national minorities of Ukraine is virtually excluded for higher education and for secondary school.
Following this, at the beginning of the year, the Law “On Peculiarities of State Policy on Ensuring State Sovereignty of Ukraine on the Temporarily Occupied Territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions” was adopted. In accordance with this law, Russia is called the “aggressor country”; it introduces, in fact, the unlimited right of the President of Ukraine to declare martial law in any region of Ukraine, even far from military operations. “Not without reasona lot of people in Ukraine believe that this is a magic wand for the current President, who will have possibility, if necessary, to disrupt the elections scheduled for next year, under the pretext that there is some kind of threat,” said Konstantin Zatulin.
Finally, on October 4, the members of the Verkhovna Rada voted for the law on ensuring the functioning of the Ukrainian language as a state languageat first reading. “It assumes that Russian is actually prohibited, wherever possible. Other languages are also prohibited, but we understand the significance of the Russian language in Ukraine, if only 47% of the people in Ukraine actually speak Ukrainian at home. And what aboutthe other 53%?They speak Russian. And now any use of the Russian language is prohibited, for example, admitting to the hospital; on television it is limited to a 25% of broadcasting time, and always with subtitles. Draconian punishments are introduced, the language is equated to the state symbol, and now three years imprisonmentis established for insulting the language, which can be understood as anything. Moreover, in the preamble to the law it is written that conversations about multilingualism, in fact, undermine Ukraine, make a language split and are considered as an impingementon the constitutional foundations of the state,”the parliamentarian listed.
“So, what we see is that modern Ukraine keeps following the way of escalation of internal and external tensions,” concluded the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee.
The parliamentarian also focused on the unfolding conflict on the issue of autocephaly for Ukrainian Orthodox Church. ”We know very well that a drama is being played out around the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. There is only one Ukrainian Orthodox Church-the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Today is the last day of the meeting of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and there has been made an attempt today to entrust the right of autocephaly for schismatics in Ukraine to just anyone. And all these things, of course, are done solely for keeping the faithful Ukrainian people away from the faithful Russian people“, – Konstantin Zatulin said.
”Of course, Western sponsors and do-gooders are on the side of Ukraine in this shameful case. The US Congress has just adopted a resolution on the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people. There was no Holodomor. There was a famine, not only in Ukraine – in the North Caucasus regions, Kazakhstan, the Volga region in 1932–1933. It is completely unhistorical, pointless and unconscionable to claim that there were any plans in the Soviet Union to eliminate Ukrainians as a nationality. Number of Russian people in Ukraine died at this time is no less than Ukrainians. Moreover, the representatives of the western regions of Ukraine, who never, at least at the time, had been citizens of the famine-stricken Soviet Union, act as accusators in the Holodomor. We have made a special statement on this issue being members of the State Duma of the fifth convocation, but they do not pay attention to it,” he reminded.
Addressing members of the State Duma, Konstantin Zatulin said that Russian parliamentarians should draw their own conclusions.
He said that an appropriate statement is being prepared, which is planned to be considered next week. ”Secondly, we must help DPR and LPR to make life there better than in the other, nationalist Ukraine, – said Konstantin Zatulin. – We must finally warn, and we will do it in a statement that if Ukrainian authorities try to launch a new revanchist assault on Donbass, in this case we will do the same as we did in 2008, when [Mikheil] Saakashvili attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And we will have no other choice. We must honestly give a fair warning about this. We did this in that State Duma, in March 2008, when we said at the hearings that if they attacked, we would recognize [independence], and we recognized then, as you know, in August 2008.“
”Finally, we must save our people in Ukraine. If we have the opportunity, and there is one, we need provide possibility for 2 million Ukrainian refugees to acquire citizenship, and the relevant laws would be adopted,”the parliamentarian concluded.
