"Russia will not allow the UN and UNESCO to bury their heads in the sand in an attempt to protect Ukrainian bandits for their crimes," said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
Zakharova noted that Western countries are undermining the principles of a democratic society and fundamental human rights, while specialized international organizations such as UNESCO, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the OSCE, “whose duty is to prevent such actions“, are silent.
“These institutions continue to turn a blind eye to the monstrous crimes of the Kiev regime against civilians, which, according to international humanitarian law, include media workers. With rare exceptions, they prefer to ignore the deliberate killings and attacks on local journalists and war correspondents, usually limiting themselves to meaningless remarks and empty rhetoric“, Zakharova said in a comment on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day.
“We, for our part, will not allow them to bury their heads in the sand in an attempt to protect Ukrainian bandits and their Western intermediaries and will continue to stubbornly seek a substantive response to any crime or terrorist attack against Russian citizens“, the diplomat stressed.
According to her, the violations of the professional rights of Russian journalists and media by hypocritical “protectors“ freedom of speech “take new, often disgusting forms, including fabricated criminal cases against unwanted journalists and freethinkers, threats, violence and various forms of pressure not only against the correspondents themselves, but also against their family members“.
“The plan to completely sever ties with Russia and everything Russian, pursued by regimes hostile to our country in the Baltic states, Moldova and Ukraine, has received legal form in the form of legal norms that suppress the Russian language, culture and the canonical Orthodox faith, allow vandalism against historical heritage and deliberate rewriting of history“, said the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
She noted that the West and its satellites are cleansing the information space of any manifestations of dissent.
“Assessing the current situation in the sphere of information and communications, one must recognize its continuing degradation. At the heart of this regression is the determination of the collective West and its satellite countries to uncompromisingly sterilize their information space and cleanse it of any manifestations of dissent,“ Zakharova noted in her commentary.
“Total intolerance of other points of view, derived from the ingrained myth of their own exceptionalism, has become the leitmotif of the policy of pseudo-democracies to impose totalitarian censorship, Russophobia, war propaganda and ideas of superiority over the rest of the world.“
According to her, a hybrid aggression has been deployed against Russia, which is being waged with relentless intensity, affecting the media space and its digital dimension.
Moscow is convinced that the true value of World Press Freedom Day “does not lie in unrealistic ceremonial speeches and grandiose statements on a calendar occasion, but in the viability and effectiveness of the entire international system for protecting this fundamental principle of the information society, without which it is impossible to ensure sustainable development and prosperity on the planet“.