Maria Zakharova
Photo: Ivan MAKEEV
– On Friday night, the Moldovan government’s Commission for Emergency Situations suspended the licenses of 6 Russian TV channels for “incorrect coverage of events in Ukraine.” As stated in the commission’s decision on the government website, we are talking about the TV channels “First in Moldova”, “RTR Moldova”, Accent TV, “NTV Moldova”, TV6 and “Orhei TV”.
– Maria Vladimirovna, how does the Russian Foreign Ministry regard this fact?
– The authorities of the Republic of Moldova are destroying forms of dissent, ways of transmitting information in its various manifestations, they simply use methods of totalitarian censorship. There has to be a dictatorship of only one point of view, there cannot be others. This is exactly the same Western model that is trying to go around the world in leaps and bounds. Moldova is not a member of the European Union, it only declares some commitment to these Western values.
But here they are, please, the European Union – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, which literally the day before blocked the very Russian-language TV channel from their information space, which for many years, under the dictates of the United States, supported economically and politically. License revocation, visa blocking. The chase is the wildest of these people, they can’t even say a word there. The West has forgotten that yesterday the whole world was taught to live in the information space. Today they are simply brandishing chains of sanctions, repressive mallets. And Moldova, unfortunately, under the current regime is going the same way.
– But in Moldova there is Gagauzia, a Russian-speaking region, which does not agree with what is dictated from the capital. Isn’t the decision that was made a violation of the rights of national minorities? Or is the sad example of Ukraine not a decree for them?
– I beg your pardon, but what about in Moldova there is only Gagauzia? In fact, I have not heard that they left Transnistria. Do you think that these regions, these ethnic-cultural groups no longer belong to you? I didn’t hear it.
You quite rightly said that, apparently, the Ukrainian example did not teach them anything. In the West, stories are told that Russia is to blame for everything. In fact, the fault lies with her government, which is blindly oriented towards the West. It was in Ukraine, now the same thing is happening in Moldova. In what kind of textbook on liberalism, in what convention on human rights, is it written that it is possible to intimidate people from an ethno-cultural group, depriving them of the opportunity to receive information overnight? There is not only political information, there is a variety of news.
This is more like war communism than democracy and liberalism! This is the same dictatorship of liberalism. This is not a defense of democracy in any way, it is, on the contrary, a cover for democracy or words about democracy for their dictatorial, totalitarian habits.
– What is your assessment of what happened this week when 50 UN member states voted against the resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism? Among them were Moldova, Ukraine, Germany, France and Italy.
– Is it the people of Moldova who voted? As soon as people want to say something or somehow participate in some process, they immediately ban something. Can people in Moldova really forget about the horrors of World War II and be in favor of the glorification of Nazism and fascism? People are ashamed of the decisions their government makes.
The same goes for Ukraine. Remember, twice the people of Ukraine elected Yanukovych as president. He’s good, he’s bad, that’s not the point. His political program consisted in resolving basic questions – ethnocultural, linguistic and political, related to the unification of the country. For the first time, he was not allowed to realize the election result at all, they had this “orange revolution”. And the second Maidan was allowed to come to power, and a year and a half later they were demolished in exactly the same way. As soon as the question was asked: how will they integrate into the Western space, when half of the country is economically oriented towards the post-Soviet space, and this gives people a large income, profit? This is a continuation of his life, his story, and it also gives benefits.
