Hello, and thank you for inviting me to attend this important conference. My colleagues have already described the many documented human rights abuses committed by the US-backed Kiev’s fascists against the indigenous Russian people of Donbass. I don’t have anything else to add other than to ask the international community to take this evidence seriously. Precisely because they haven’t, however, is what I’d like to briefly discuss over the next seven minutes or so.

Incontrovertible evidence has since emerged that Kiev’s forces are irresponsibly deploying heavy weaponry in residential areas, preventing civilians — including foreign students — from leaving areas of operations, and are even actively recruiting mercenaries from across the world under the cover of being so-called “volunteers”. All of these have happened in just the past few weeks and have been fully documented, even sometimes bragged about by Kiev itself, yet the West remains silent.

The US-led West doesn’t sincerely believe in human rights since all of these violations that my colleagues cited have been well-known over the past eight years. They only selectively support their own subjective interpretation of “human rights”. This policy is referred to by them as the so-called “rules-based international order”, which isn’t based on the legitimate rules-based order enshrined in the UN Charter but is full of double standards aimed at advancing their self-interested geostrategic goals.

Regarding Donbass, they have no interest in acknowledging the genuine human rights violations that their fascist proxies in Kiev committed since coming to power after the 2014 “EuroMaidan” coup that followed weeks of urban terrorism. The US-led West deliberately supported the violation of Ukrainians’ human rights during that Color Revolution and for eight years afterwards. Nevertheless, their dominant position in the Mainstream Media misled many across the world into not recognizing this as such.

Their tactics consist of spreading false information about Russian actions, policies, and those in Ukraine who’ve presented evidence of Kiev’s US-backed crimes. They also include gaslighting the public into wrongly regarding this evidence as so-called “fake news” and “propaganda” even though it’s their own denial thereof that’s literal fake news and propaganda. This is part of their ongoing information warfare campaign against Russia that’s within their full-spectrum Hybrid War against it.

The purpose in this context has been to hijack control of the Ukrainian state through the imposition of their fascist proxies via the urban spree of terrorism popularly known as “EuroMaidan” in order to transform the country into the so-called “anti-Russia”. This strategic concept refers to establishing fascist control over Ukraine’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (which can collectively be referred to as their “deep state”) in order to weaponize them against Russia.

The outcome has since been revealed by President Putin from his address to the Russian people on 24 February announcing the onset of his country’s special operation in Ukraine and follow-up statements by other Russian officials. The US’ anti-Russian NATO alliance was secretly invited into Ukraine by their fascist proxies to set up military infrastructure in preparation of a surprise conventional attack against Russia sometime in the future. They also helped Ukraine research biological and nuclear weapons.

This attack that President Putin said on 24 February “cannot be avoided” would have presumably come after the US neutralized Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities through more regional deployments of so-called “anti-missile systems” and strike weapons near its borders. These would have even been dispatched to Ukraine sometime after Kiev intensified its US-backed third round of civil war hostilities in Donbass, which occurred the week prior to Russia’s special operation and most directly triggered it.

President Putin preempted this attempt to eventually spark World War III through the decisive timing of this operation, which spoiled NATO’s plans. He was also forced to act when he did in order to stop Kiev’s US-supported genocide against the indigenous Russian people of Donbass. This sequence of events is either deliberately suppressed in the West or misportrayed as so-called “fake news” or “propaganda” as part of their information war against Russia that’s within their larger Hybrid War against it.

To return to the topic of human rights that this conference is most directly covering, the US supported the Kiev fascists’ genocide in Donbass because it served their geostrategic interests of transforming the Ukrainian state into the “anti-Russia” ahead of NATO’s planned surprise attack against Russia from its territory that would have followed the neutralization of its nuclear second-strike capabilities. By omitting these facts from the public discourse, the West is discrediting its own human rights rhetoric.

This isn’t accidental, but by design, because it’s all about the selective support of their own subjective interpretation of this concept aimed at advancing their geostrategic interests vis-à-vis Russia in order to restore the US’ declining unipolar hegemony. The weaponization of human rights, both its selective support by the West and its gaslighting of evidence about Kiev’s violations of human rights as “fake news”, is among the main Hybrid War tactics nowadays.

It’s of the utmost importance for sincere believers in peace, human rights, and international law to call this out for what it is – Hybrid Warfare against Russia – in order to raise global awareness of this immoral scheme. Western propaganda is very intense right now but explaining this to the masses can help to neutralize its effect and even get folks to realize that they’ve been manipulated by their own governments into perversely supporting human rights violations in Donbass over the past eight years.

RIA Novosti’s press conference on the International Public Tribunal for Ukraine can be watched in Russian here.