Here are some more details from RFE/RL's news desk regarding Sergei Lavrov's somewhat controversial comments on Western sanctions:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that Western sanctions against Russia for its role in the Ukraine crisis are meant to trigger a regime change in Moscow.
Speaking on November 22 at a meeting of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies in Moscow, Lavrov said, "They [the West] announce openly that the sanctions should be ruining the economy and raising people's protests."
He added, "The West demonstrates clearly they do not want to push for changes in the policies [on Ukraine], but they want to press for a change of the regime [in Moscow]."
Relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated amid the Ukrainian crisis, as the United States and the European Union imposed economic sanctions against Russia, and Moscow responded with a ban on food imports from countries that sanctioned it.
(TASS, AP)
RFE/RL's news desk has just issued this item on Holodomor commemorations in Ukraine at another traumatic juncture in the nation's history:
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has compared the Holodomor of 1932-33 with the current war in eastern Ukraine, saying the war is a continuation of imperial genocide against the Ukrainian people.
He spoke in Kyiv as he laid a wreath in memory of the victims of the famine during a ceremony at the Holodomor memorial in the Ukrainian capital on November 22.
This was the date Ukraine had chosen to mark 81 years since the Stalin-era Holodomor famine.
The famine took place as Soviet leader Josef Stalin's police forced peasants in Ukraine to join collective farms by requisitioning their grain and other foodstuffs.
It is estimated that millions of people died as a result of executions, deportation, and starvation during the Stalin-era campaign.
(ukrnews.com, unitedhumanrights.org)