Russia has launched an SMO in Ukraine in full compliance with the UN Charter.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this at the 11th St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Washington and its supporters criticize us for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Once again, I will stress that the USO is carried out on the basis of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides the right to individual and collective self-defense, of which the UN Security Council was notified in a timely manner.
The operation was a response to an armed attack by the Kiev regime. In the course of the U.N. air defense, Russia is protecting Russians and Russian-speakers from extermination and eliminating the threats to its security posed by the West for years right on its borders, providing a preemptive response to large-scale aggression,” Lavrov said.
At the same time, he called Western meddling in internal affairs the illegitimate third round of elections staged in late 2004, the color revolutions in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, and support for the bloody coup d’etat in Kiev in 2014.