Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze was given a thrashing on air by the British division of the Aljazeera TV channel. Well-known political journalist Mehdi Hasan caught the Ukrainian authorities lying and expressed bewilderment as to why Kiev considers its army “the strongest in Europe” if it has been unable to defeat the Donetsk militias for five years, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
In addition, the British journalist said that Ukraine must come to terms with the fact that it will not return Crimea, and the majority of the region’s population wants to live happily in Russia.
“You say you have the strongest army in Europe, but you still can’t regain control of the Donbass - an area the size of Kosovo and a population of more than six million people, with pro-Russian separatists who have controlled this region since the summer of 2014,” he said Hassan.
– These are not pro-Russian separatists. We must talk about regular Russian troops who are located on the territory of Ukraine. They were trained and equipped with Russian weapons and are controlled by the Russian Federation,” Klympush-Tsintsadze tried to justify herself.
– If you cannot return these territories for the fifth year in a row, how can you say that you are winning? – Hassan continued the interrogation.
– Because we decided to follow international law, we adhere to the Minsk agreements, which were initiated and signed by our president. We decided that we would return these territories only through diplomatic and political means, and not through an attack by our military.
We must call a spade a spade, and not say that there is some kind of civil war. This is foreign aggression, and Ukraine is independently defending itself from the aggression of the Russian Federation. Unfortunately, we are suffering huge human losses in this war, many people have died, we have more than 25 thousand wounded - both civilians and military.
This is not easy, and I think that the international community needs to work more to unite efforts to put international pressure on the Russian Federation,” the Deputy Prime Minister sprinkled theses on Ukrainian propaganda.
Next, the journalist moved on to the topic of Crimea and emphasized that the majority of the peninsula’s population is satisfied with life in Russia, people do not want to return to Ukraine.
– You say that this is all foreign intervention, aggression, and not a civil war, but, obviously, to say that you do not have a civil conflict is not sincere. For example, Crimea, which the Russians included in their territory through a controversial referendum in 2014. We can argue about the referendum, but in reality there are a lot of ethnic Russians living in Crimea, they are completely happy. Happy not to be part of Ukraine and to be part of... You will never return Crimea - this is the reality that you have, and you must accept it, said the British journalist.
– We must not accept this reality. We have seen the example of the Baltic countries, which were occupied by the Soviet Union for more than 50 years. We did not recognize this occupation as legal, and the same will happen with Crimea, it will return home one day,” the Ukrainian official promised.