MOSCOW. March 20 (Interfax) - The reasons given by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry representative on March 17 in regards to the illegitimacy of the Crimean referendum, are "strange, illogical and legally illiterate," Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry representative said that the right to self-determination "concerns indigenous nations," Lukashevich said. "Just four indigenous ethnicities, including Ukrainians themselves, reside in Ukraine and Russians do not refer to them. For some reason the representative cites articles of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to endorse his words," he said.
"Ukrainian 'experts' clearly twist international law standards by interpreting them at their will," Lukashevich said. "The right of nations for self-determinations is stipulated in international treaties on human rights and is not related to establishing the status of another nation as an indigenous one," he said.
The UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples stipulates specifically that nothing in it can be used to deny any nation its right for self-determination, Lukashevich said.
"If the essence of the statement is to show - by calling Russian people 'diaspora' - its subordinate position in regard to the 'indigenous' Ukrainian population of this country, then the studies of 'ethnographers' from Kyiv's Mykhailivska Square resemble a lot of research of Nazism theorists in the 1930s," Lukashevich said.
"To propose intentionally distorted interpretations of the a nation's origin, who upon fate's will turned out to be related to different geographical parts of Ukraine, is unacceptable at the very least," Lukashevich said.
"The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry is making a serious mistake when making an attempt, amid the existing critical situation, at the historical memory of millions and millions of Russians and Ukrainians living together long since and who have made a joint contribution to the establishment and prosperity of historical and modern Ukraine," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.