Chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, former Member of Parliament of Ukraine Refat Chubarov has said the Russian delegation insists that the issue of the annexation of Crimea be removed from the declaration of the 26 annual meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Bratislava (Slovakia).
Read alsoChubarov: Ukraine should develop clear strategy to return Crimea
"The prepared draft of the relevant Declaration reflects the results of the review of the situation in Ukraine, which states that the OSCE should continue to pay attention to temporarily occupied Crimea, using all OSCE tools for this. However, the delegation of the Russian Federation insists on the removal of any mention of Crimea from the said OSCE document," says an appeal to participants in the meeting, which was posted by Chubarov on Facebook on December 5.
The Mejlis has called on the OSCE not to yield to blackmail by Russians and to include the issue of the end of Crimea occupation in the General Political Declaration.
UNIAN memo. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March 2014 after its troops had occupied the peninsula. An illegal referendum was held for Crimeans to decide on accession to Russia. De-facto Crimean authorities reported that allegedly 96.77% of the Crimean population had voted for joining Russia. On March 18, 2014, the so-called agreement on the accession of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to Russia was signed in the Kremlin. The West did not recognize the annexation in response to which sanctions against Russia were introduced. Ukraine's parliament voted to designate February 20, 2014, as the official date when the temporary occupation of Crimea began.
