London’s dissenting approaches to the situation with the Falkland Islands and the Crimean Peninsula is a display of double standards, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday.”There is such a thing as double standards,” Lavrov said, answering a question about the Falkland Islands. He explained that, in regard to those islands, the UK “very strongly” insisted that the people have the right for self-identification.
“By the way, we reminded the Brits about it, when they got agitated about the Crimean referendum in March 2014. We asked them: do people of the [Falkland Islands], located 10,000 kilometers away from England, have a luxury of self-identification, while the Crimeans, who were a part of our country throughout history, are denied such a right? The answer was simple: ‘those are different things’,” the top diplomat said, adding that he leaves this “to the Brits’ conscience.”
Speaking about the situation with the Falkland Islands, the foreign minister expressed certainty that “this dispute must be solved via dialogue, as it is mentioned in the UN General Assembly resolution.”
“We will continue to vote for the implementation of these resolutions in practice,” Lavrov said.
The Falkland Islands is an archipelago located in Southwestern Atlantic, comprised of two major islands and over 700 smaller islands and rocks. It is a subject of territorial dispute between Argentina and the UK. The 1982 armed conflict over these territories ended with the defeat of Argentina and restoration of the British control over the archipelago.
