Ukraine slammed Russia on Saturday, accusing Moscow of unleashing a global propaganda campaign to persuade global powers not to recognize an election that gave the presidency to a pro-Western tycoon.
Ukraine slammed Russia on Saturday, accusing Moscow of unleashing a global propaganda campaign to persuade global powers not to recognize an election that gave the presidency to a pro-Western tycoon.
Ukraine's acting foreign minister said Russia was now using every means at its disposal to unsettle the new Kiev leaders.
"Five days since elections, there has been no official recognition yet.
Obviously, the Russian Federation doesn't have legal grounds to question the election's legitimacy," Andriy Deshchytsya wrote in an opinion piece published in Saturday's edition of the English-language Kyiv Post.
"The massive... information campaign Kremlin has launched these days, with an avalanche of doubletalk and fake news, signals one thing -- this is Russia's last chance to try shifting the balance of international public opinion," he wrote.
Russia on Friday accused Ukraine of breaching the 1949 Geneva Conventions protecting civilians in wartime by killing and wounding peaceful citizens during its seven-week "anti-terrorist operation" in the separatist industrial regions of Lugansk and Donetsk.
And a furious information campaign unleashed by Russia's state media portrays Kiev protesters as "fascists" and accuses the army of unleashing a "punitive operation" -- the term once used to portray Nazi atrocities during World War II.
For its part, Washington praised Ukraine for showing utmost "restraint" and accused the pro-Russian militias of "murder, kidnapping, and looting".
"We have a fundamental disagreement with the Russians about what the Ukrainian government is doing and the validity of their own right to maintain calm and order in their own country," US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
"And in our view, since the beginning of the unrest, while we've seen numerous human rights abuses by the separatists, including murder, kidnapping, and looting, the Ukrainian government has, continues to have, the responsibility to enforce law and order on its territory."
