Aleksandr Volgarev on the ongoing gross violations of the rights of the Russian and Russian-speaking population by some Western OSCE participating States, 21 July 2022

STATEMENT BY MR. ALEKSANDR VOLGAREV,

DEPUTY PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION,

AT THE 1383rd MEETING OF THE OSCE PERMANENT COUNCIL

21 July 2022

On the ongoing gross violations

of the rights of the Russian and Russian-speaking population

by some Western OSCE participating States

Mr. Chairperson,

Discrimination against the Russian and Russian-speaking population by a number of Western participating States has not abated. For example, according to the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, 701 crimes against citizens of Russian origin have been recorded since February. And this figure continues to grow constantly.

One of the leaders in terms of Russophobia undoubtedly remains Poland, the country chairing the OSCE. Contemporary Polish politicians stop at nothing to advance their political agenda, including the consigning to oblivion and distortion of the bloodstained, tragic pages of history and the betrayal of the memory of tens of thousands of innocent victims. On 11 July, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki made a cynical statement on the occasion of the National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists against citizens of the Second Polish Republic. In that statement, he tried to equate the predecessors of today’s Ukrainian neo-Nazis – the sadists from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – with the entire “Russian world”.

We would remind you that, in the early hours of 11 July 1943, members of the OUN/UPA attacked as many as one hundred settlements in the Volhynian Voivodeship. Over ten thousand defenceless peasants were brutally exterminated in just that one day. Elderly people, pregnant women and infants died a martyr’s death simply because they had been born Poles. However, today, having gorged itself on Russophobia, the Polish Government has no qualms about even supplying tanks, combat vehicles, artillery, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition and so on to a regime that glorifies Bandera and Shukhevych. We consider this an insult to the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians who died at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists.

Recently, another high-ranking Polish politician, the Marshal of the Sejm (lower house of the Polish Parliament) Elżbieta Witek, said that not only Putin and his associates were to blame for the atrocities of the war in Ukraine, but the entire Russian people. A kind of “collective responsibility” on the part of the entire Russian-speaking population, if you will. Against the backdrop of these hate-inciting statements, it is not surprising that this country exhibits the strongest anti-Russian sentiment in all of Europe. The results of an opinion poll by the pro-American Democracy Perception Index project testify to this.

The floodgates for Russophobia have also been opened in the Baltic countries. We are forced to repeat these words here time and time again. There continues to be a deliberate “war” on Soviet war memorial sites there. On 13 July, it became known that excavations were being carried out at the site of a common grave of Red Army soldiers in the Estonian town of Rakvere, and an obelisk was razed to the ground at the burial place. Judging by the position taken by the Director of the Estonian War Museum, Hellar Lill, who called this act of vandalism an ordinary “reburial”, this is not the last we will have heard of such instances of desecration.

The senseless “war” to eradicate the common historical memory and everything Russian continues in Latvia too. There are plans to rename dozens of streets in the country, including streets in Riga named after Pushkin, Lermontov, the academician Mstislav Keldysh and many others. To think that it was Riga that gave the world such great figures of Russian and world culture as film director Sergei Eisenstein, philosopher Nikolay Lossky and sculptor Vera Mukhina. By the looks of it, their memory has no place in modern-day Latvia either.

The “war” against Soviet monuments has reached its apogee. On 14 July, the Latvian Government approved the idea of dismantling 69 memorials, including the destruction of the Monument to the Liberators of Riga. To finance this Russophobic venture, the Riga mayor’s office is even prepared to allocate some three million euros from contingency funds.

A “war” is also being waged against all forms of dissent in that country. Around eighty criminal cases have already been initiated against public figures who are not to the Latvian Government’s liking. What is more, children from the Riga Children’s Radio and Television Academy “Academy KidsTV” and their teachers may be added to this list in the near future. The Latvian State Security Service is investigating them for suspected treason simply because they took part in the Slavic Bazaar festival in Vitebsk.

Such actions are rather what one would expect from a police State and are in no way in line with European democratic values. The Latvian Russian Union party has already sent a petition to the European Parliament asking it to intervene in the situation in the country and stop the large-scale Russophobic campaign and the demolition of monuments.

Mr. Chairperson,

Now for a few words about the segregation of the information space along ethnic lines. Over the past few years, we have regularly raised the issue at the OSCE of discrimination against Russian and Russian-language media by representatives of countries from the Western alliance. However, it is difficult to find an analogy in modern history for what has been happening in the global information space since 24 February. What we are witnessing is the systematic destruction by the collective West of the very notion of media pluralism through a wholesale purging of the information field of all Russian, Russian-language and Russia-affiliated media presenting a point of view that differs from the Western narrative. At the same time, some participating States continue to employ the entire arsenal of repression and restrictions against those who disseminate such a point of view. Russian journalists, war correspondents, editors-in-chief, public figures and so on have been declared enemies. Here are just a few recent examples.

Following the European Union and the United States of America, press sanctions were adopted in Canada on 9 July. Moreover, the Canadian Government, which is such an ardent defender here at the OSCE of the rights of journalists, has surpassed even its North American “big brother” in its zeal to censor information and restrict freedom of speech. The Canadian “stop list” included 29 Russian journalists and 15 media outlets, including Channel One, Rossiya 1, NTV, TASS, VGTRK, Gazprom-Media, National Media Group, Rossiya 24, Smotrim, Vesti.ru, RT, Sputnik and Regnum.

Nor is the United Kingdom lagging far behind in this respect. Apparently not satisfied with the restrictive measures imposed on a large number of reporters from the television channels RT, VGTRK and Channel One, the Govorit Moskva (“Moscow Talking”) radio station and the Sputnik news agency, the UK Government continues to hunt down sources of information that do not fit into the picture which it presents of the world and to impose illegitimate restrictions on them. On 5 July, sanctions were imposed on the staff of two further Russian Internet publications: Yevgeniy Glotov and Yuriy Fedin, managers of the NewsFront media group, and Denis Gafner and Valeriya Kalabayeva, journalists of the SouthFront project.

Estonia also continues its attacks on the media. On 11 and 12 July, the Estonian authorities denied entry to Andrey Starikov, editor-in-chief of the Baltnews news agency, and Marat Kasem, editor-in-chief of Sputnik Lithuania. The latter, incidentally, is a Latvian citizen. In this regard, the silence of the Latvian representatives on this matter is surprising. Apparently they are far more interested in the fate of the Dozhd television channel, which has been suspended in Russia, than in defending the interests of their own citizens.

Mr. Chairperson,

Discrimination against Russian speakers in the field of education is also a cause for concern. An article recently published by the Politico media outlet claims that “Russophobia has become almost normal” in European universities. Some institutions actively promote it – such instances have been reported at Adam Mickiewicz University in the Polish city of Poznań, the University of West London and others. Tartu University in Estonia even announced that it would bar all future Russian applicants from admission, citing “security” grounds. Such egregious cases are just the most glaring examples of how the right to education has become a hostage to political expediency and Russophobia.

Mr. Chairperson,

The persecution of Russian and Russian-speaking citizens and the discrimination against Russian media in the West are at odds with many OSCE human dimension commitments. We have enumerated them here many times and we shall not repeat ourselves. The countries of the Western alliance must stop these harmful practices and start respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms. The representatives of the OSCE executive structures are called upon to finally respond, in accordance with their mandates, to what is happening.

Thank you for your attention.