MOSCOW. May 23 (Interfax) - It's inadmissible to infringe rights of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, including after the possible end of hostilities, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.
"Millions of people speak Russian on the territory of Ukraine that lies beyond the constitutional borders of Russia, this is their native tongue. It would be a grave crime to leave them under control of the junta that has prohibited them even from speaking Russian (they have not been prohibited from thinking so far)," Lavrov said at a conference themed 'Historical South Russian Lands. National Identity and Self-Determination of Peoples' at the Russian Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.
"If they [the Ukrainian government] are expecting that an agreement on the end of hostilities would somehow be concluded and what's left of Ukraine would live by the laws they had adopted, it's an illusion, this must not be allowed to happen in any case," Lavrov said.
"We cannot leave the people under control of the current regime," he said.
"We will not allow that to happen for sure," Lavrov said, adding he was hoping that "the international community would not allow such a mockery of the UN Charter."
For now, "the simplest settlement effort, [...] the simplest and absolutely correct one is to demand that laws directly violating the UN Charter, not to mention numerous conventions on the rights of ethnic minorities, be abolished," Lavrov said. "That would be a test for what the Europeans' position really is," he said.