A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that Moscow would respond to Ankara if it continued its defamatory rhetoric towards Russia because of the Crimean Tatars.
Moscow – Sputnik. Zakharova said during a press briefing, today, Friday, that “if this speech continues, we will have to draw attention to similar problems in Turkey itself.”
“We do not wish to do this, and for this reason I hope the Turkish Foreign Ministry will hear us, describing Ankara’s statements as politicized and confrontational about the intention to protect the rights of the deported Crimean Tatars who face challenges,” she added.
Zakharova questioned the role of the Turkish state as a defender of the rights of ethnic minorities, explaining that Turkey itself has unresolved problems due to ethnic, linguistic and religious factors.
“We believe that the time has come for Turkish politicians to abandon the use of the ethnic factor as a tool for the geopolitical game, which primarily harms the interests of the ethnic groups themselves,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that the results of opinion polls in 2020 in the Crimean Republic indicate that 96 percent of the population of Crimea described relations between representatives of different ethnic and religious sects as good.
And the Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov had revealed earlier that Turkey’s position on the Crimea is one of the big differences between Moscow and Ankara.
Crimea’s belonging to Russia became a foregone conclusion when the people of the Crimean peninsula voted in favor of restoring Russian identity and returning to the embrace of the homeland.
On September 3, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed the end of the Crimean issue.
Putin explained that
The issue of Crimean belonging was decided by the residents of the peninsula when they voted in favor of returning to Russia, noting that “a return to the previous situation is non-existent.”
It is worth noting that the Crimea has returned to a Russian federal territory, after a referendum that took place on March 16, 2014, in the peninsula and the city of Sevastopol, and both regions became within the Russian Federation, as of March 18 2014, and this day was considered an official holiday in the peninsula Crimea, and the city of Sevastopol.
And Crimea was one of the Russian regions until the beginning of the fifties of the twentieth century when the authorities of the Union of Soviet Republics decided to transfer their subordination administratively to the Republic of Ukraine.