Churkin: people of Crimea use their right to self-determination
NEW YORK CITY. March 20 (Interfax) - The Crimean referendum was held in compliance with international laws and without external influence, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said.
"In strict compliance with international laws and democratic procedures, without external influence, the people of Crimea held a free referendum to exercise their right to self-determination declared by the UN Charter and numerous fundamental international legal acts and requested that Russia admit Crimea into the Russian Federation," he told the UN Security Council.
Speaking of approximately 300,000 Crimean Tatars, "a substantial number of them are also oriented towards Russia, no matter what appeals have been made in preparations for the referendum," the diplomat said.
"We have paid attention to the reaction of some of our Western partners who still cannot rid of their imperial and colonial custom to dictate their will upon other countries and peoples and get nervous because the geopolitical gamble in Ukraine has yielded results they were not expecting," Churkin said.
"The pseudo-friends of Ukraine must finally realize that the crisis is not rooted in Russia but in the irresponsible actions of certain Ukrainian political forces and their foreign curators. The wish to push Ukraine and other 'focus states' of Eastern Partnership towards an artificial choice between the EU and Russia brought about, to a large extent, the domestic political crisis, which led to the anti-constitutional revolt in Kyiv," he noted.