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Vladimir Putin PHOTO: Reuters
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To call the Russians an indigenous people of Ukraine is not just incorrect, but ridiculous and stupid, said Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Russia-24 television.
“It is an obvious fact that the people who joined the Russian state together with these territories were called Russians. Therefore, to talk about the Russians as a non-indigenous people is not just incorrect, it is ridiculous and stupid,” he was quoted as saying. from TASS and BTA.
Putin noted that in the 17th century, the inhabitants of present-day Ukraine “considered and called themselves Russian and Orthodox.”
On May 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that a bill on Ukraine’s indigenous peoples had been submitted to parliament to guarantee their rights. The way the test describes which nation is considered indigenous means that this does not apply to Russians.
This bill does not meet the norms of international humanitarian law, but the West will not react to that, Putin said. Kiev’s idea of declaring the Russians a non-indigenous population of Ukraine is “a powerful, very serious blow to the Russian people as a whole, and this, of course, cannot be indifferent to us,” the Russian president said.
Attempts to divide the peoples of Ukraine into indigenous and non-indigenous in general “resemble the theory and practice of Nazi Germany,” Putin said, commenting on the Ukrainian bill.
In his interview, he also touched on the topic of Ukraine’s entry into NATO. He called “smart people” those Ukrainians – in his words, they are “at least 50 percent” who do not want their country to become a member of NATO. He explained their position by their unwillingness to be on the firing line and to be “a bargaining chip and cannon fodder”, Interfax reported.
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