The word is witnessing a crime of an international scale – Russia has performed a military invasion of the territory of a sovereign nation – Ukraine. By doing so Russia, has violated every current bilateral and multilateral international agreement and norms of the international law that guarantee the inviolability of borders and sovereignty of our country, as well the security of its citizens.

This act of aggression on the part of the Russian leadership is using the cover of a mendacious concern over the rights of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine and the Russian citizens living here.

The Russian leadership has effectively deployed in this case the Brezhnev doctrine pulled out from the Cold War archives – the so called Limited Sovereignty Doctrine – which served as an ideological justification for the Warsaw Pact military invasion to Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

The invasion is being accompanied by staged mass disorders in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine, aiming to demonstrate that the country is in chaos and that the population of these regions supposedly is not willing to recognize the new authorities in Kyiv and see their future under a Russian protectorate.

All this graphically demonstrate that the purpose of the invasion is not the Crimea but Kyiv and that Russia wants to see a dismembered and weakened Ukraine as a buffer zone at its Western borders.

We affirm that Russia, in this case, is not protecting the rights of the Russian citizens living in Ukraine, but on the contrary, is deliberately destroying the foundations of the constitutional order of our state and is inflicting an irreparable harm upon the rights and freedoms of all citizens, everyone living now in Ukraine.

We appeal to our colleagues, human rights activists, and the international community, to Russian intelligentsia, to the entire Russian society – to not allow the escalation of armed hostilities fraught with a large scale military conflict in the center of Europe. The lives of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and the civilian populations should not be sacrificed for the sake of crazy ambitions of politicians.