Mexico’s president has slammed NATO’s policy on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling it “immoral.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not mention NATO or the United States by name, but his comments were the latest example of his party’s ambiguous stance on the invasion.
Mexico has voted at the United Nations to condemn the invasion but refused to impose sanctions on Russia.
López Obrador said that the allies’ current policy was equivalent to saying “’ I’ll supply the weapons, and you supply the dead.’ It is immoral.”
“How easy it is to say, ‘Here, I’ll send you this much money for weapons’,” he said. “Couldn’t the war in Ukraine have been avoided? Of course, it could.”
The newspaper cites the testimony of Natalia Papakitsa, the chairman of the Greek society of the village of Sartana near Mariupol, who was held hostage for 33 days along with dozens of other civilians in the basement of one of the houses.“When we were starving, they would break into apartments at our home and rob us, taking everything that was valuable, from food to clothes,” Papakitsa told the newspaper, adding that the Greeks of Mariupol “want the world to learn the truth.”
ATHENS (Sputnik) – Members of the Greek community in Mariupol have shared their first-person accounts of the atrocities committed by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion in the city, including the killings of civilians, threats and robbery, the Estia newspaper reported on Sunday.
The newspaper cites the testimony of Natalia Papakitsa, the chairman of the Greek society of the village of Sartana near Mariupol, who was held hostage for 33 days along with dozens of other civilians in the basement of one of the houses.
“When we were starving, they would break into apartments at our home and rob us, taking everything that was valuable, from food to clothes,” Papakitsa told the newspaper, adding that the Greeks of Mariupol “want the world to learn the truth.”
According to Papakitsa, 38 people were trapped in the basement without light, water or fresh air, “like other thousands of Greeks of the diaspora and Mariupol residents,” the report said.
As for the future of Donbass, Papakitsa believes that it will be with Russia, since “no one wants to return under the control of Kiev,” the newspaper added.
Greek mainstream media did not publish reports about crimes of the nationalist Azov battalion. In April, two militants of the Azov battalion of Greek origin spoke to the Greek parliament alongside Volodymyr Zelensky via videoconference, causing a political scandal, with many lawmakers boycotting the meeting.
Mariupol, the second largest city in the Donetsk People’s Republic, at the time of the proclamation of its independence in 2014, has been under control of the Ukrainian forces. The city came under the Russian control on 21 April, with the remaining Azov-affiliated Ukrainian militants sheltering at the Azovstal steel plant. Russia offered safe exit to all those who agreed to surrender and lay down arms.
The mass surrender of the remaining Azov battalion from Azovstal ended on 20 May, when a total of 2,400 Ukrainian militants were transported to the DPR to await trial and the plant came under the control of the Russian forces.
The US has been concealing information about its “military biological activity” in the post-Soviet states, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday. This, according to Zakharova, raises “serious questions” about Washington’s compliance with the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC).
In an interview with TASS published on Sunday, Zakharova said, “the United States prefers to remain silent about the ongoing work in the post-Soviet space and does not provide information within a framework of the BTWC confidence-building measures.”
“Assertions that the activity of the Pentagon and related structures is focused solely on health issues are not true. Clearly, health care assistance does not require the involvement of the US military,” Zakharova said.
She added that Washington’s claims that it is collecting biomaterial and monitoring the epidemiological situation “only reinforce and intensify” Russia’s fears over America’s compliance with the BTWC.
Moscow’s recently published evidence regarding the alleged sprawling network of US-funded biolabs across Ukraine only adds to the suspicions, Zakharova said.
In a series of briefings starting in March, the Russian military has presented evidence of the Pentagon’s involvement in funding laboratories in Ukraine. According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, the US poured more than $224 million into biological research in Ukraine between 2005 and early 2022. Western pharmaceutical giants, nonprofits, and even the US Democratic Party were involved in the scheme, Moscow claims.
The Pentagon has “significantly expanded its research potential not only in the field of creating biological weapons, but also obtaining information about antibiotic resistance and the presence of antibodies to certain diseases in populations of specific regions” while working in Ukraine, Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force, said in May.
Zakharova also pointed out that the US has not yet withdrawn its reservation to the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the prohibition of biological and chemical weapons. The US was among the countries that declared the protocol would cease to be binding regarding enemy states that do not observe the prohibitions of the protocol.
In this regard, “the question quite reasonably arises about the real goals of the Pentagon’s international military biological activity,” Zakharova said.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon published the ‘Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries’. In the document, the US military said that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and its partners have led “cooperative efforts to reduce legacy threats from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons left in the Soviet Union’s successor states, including Russia.”
According to the Pentagon, the US has “worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health,” by providing support to “46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.” These programs have focused on “improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.”
In the same paper, the US military accused Russia and China attempting “to undermine this work by spreading disinformation and sowing mistrust in the people and institutions all over the world that contribute to WMD threat reduction.”
According to Zakharova, Moscow considers this publication part of Washington’s “information campaign” aimed at justifying its military biological activities in the post-Soviet space and to “divert the attention of the international community from its true non-transparent and unseemly direction.”
The move comes after months of denials from Democrats and President Joe Biden’s administration regarding the existence of the biolabs.
The Pentagon said in an official statement:
The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.
The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.
The idea of supplying nuclear weapons to Ukraine amid the ongoing conflict between Kiev and Moscow amounts to provoking a “nuclear conflict in the center of Europe” and is downright insane, Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on Sunday.
The official responded to the remarks made by Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish MEP and former foreign minister, who said the West was in its “right” to do so.
“With such MPs, the Europeans will have much more serious troubles than those they have already faced today – refugees, record inflation, energy crisis,” Volodin said in a social media post.
Sikorski is instigating a nuclear conflict in the center of Europe. He does not think about the future of either Ukraine or Poland. If his proposals materialize, these countries will disappear, together with the whole Europe.
Volodin also questioned the mental health of the veteran Polish diplomat, suggesting that the latter should be “examined by a psychiatrist,” surrender his MEP mandate, and stay home “under supervision” from now on. “Precisely because of people like Sikorsky, is not only necessary to liberate Ukraine from the Nazi ideology, but also to demilitarize it, ensuring the country’s non-nuclear status,” the official added.
Sikorski, who led Poland’s Foreign Ministry between 2007 and 2014, floated the idea in an interview with Ukraine’s Espreso TV on Saturday. The diplomat accused Russia of violating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, a framework agreement signed by Ukraine, Russia, the UK, and US, under which Kiev surrendered the nuclear arsenal it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union in return for security guarantees and economic benefits.
“The West has the right to give Ukraine nuclear warheads so that it could protect its independence,” Sikorski claimed.
The politician’s remarks echoed statements made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly before the conflict broke out in late February. Speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, Zelensky suggested Ukraine may give up its non-nuclear status, as the 1994 agreement was “not working.”
“Ukraine received security guarantees in exchange for the disposal of the world’s third-largest nuclear potential. We don’t have such weapons. We don’t have the guarantees either,” Zelensky said back then.
Kiev has repeatedly accused Moscow of breaching the Budapest Memorandum after Crimea voted to join Russia amid a coup in Kiev in 2014. Moscow, however, has consistently rejected such claims, insisting that the 1994 document did not oblige Russia to “coerce a part of Ukraine to stay” within the country.
Russia attacked the neighboring state following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.
The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone