Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has termed the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and its Western allies as tantamount to human rights violations.
According to media reports, the Bangladeshi Prime Minister asked the United States to withdraw the sanctions it imposed on Russia as their punitive action is causing immense sufferings to people throughout the world.
She said: “I think that it is justified to retreat from the act of punishing one country which is hurting the people of the whole world”.
Sheikh Hasina said that the US-led sanctions were tantamount to violation of human rights as it is not fair to deprive all humans of their basic rights.
Hasina said it is unfortunate that when the whole world is being affected by the Covid-19 pandemic the Russia-Ukraine war has brought more miseries.
“Above all, the US-imposed sanctions have blocked the availability of items that Bangladesh imports’, she added.
Sheikh Hasina said, the transportation cost has gone up while the sources of availability of the goods have been shrunk.
She said, the sanctions is not only causing sufferings to Bangladesh, it also is affecting every country in the world, including the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom.
“People are the sufferers. The developed countries should specially think about it”, she said.
In this connection, Sheikh Hasina said that the US should understand that the sanctions are inflicting pain for their own people too. They also should look into the matter.
“You want to hurt a country [Russia] by slapping sanctions. But how much are they affected?” she questioned.
She said that the people of the other countries from low-income to developing and developed are much more affected by the restrictions.
Sheikh Hasina said the Ukraine war and the subsequent sanctions have hit Bangladesh just when it was just recovering from the adverse effects of coronavirus pandemic.
“This is really a great challenge for us and it has to be overcome”, Hasina said.
She also mentioned that the war should not prevent transportation of goods from one country to another and the international trading must continue uninterrupted.
The Bangladeshi PM pointed that the supply of food is being greatly hampered by the sanctions and it is affecting many developed countries too.
She said that her government is trying to increase food production through optimum use of its arable lands to meet the domestic demand and help others too.
“But to boost the food production we need fertilizer, diesel and other related materials. We are not getting the inputs”, she bemoaned.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed the top European Union diplomat’s ridiculous idea of seizing Russian government reserves. Mr. Lavrov said, seizing Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves would be nothing short of theft. He said: “It seems fair to say that this is a theft they [the Western nations] do not even try to conceal”.
The Russian Foreign Minister’s comments came when an EU official suggested seizing Russia’s frozen reserves and using them to cover the costs of rebuilding Ukraine once the conflict is over.
Lavrov said, such actions “become a sort of a habit for the West”. He added, pointing to the fact that the United States had frozen funds belonging to Afghanistan, the Afghan Central Bank.
He said, Washington has no plans to spend them on the needs of the Afghan people that have suffered the consequences of the 20-year-long NATO presence on their soil.
When the EU official Borrell himself unveiled the idea in May 2022, he also referred to US President Joe Biden’s decision to set aside billions worth of the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank, adding, however, that they would be used to benefit the Afghan people.
The Russian minister also questioned Borrell’s role by saying that “We might soon see the position of the EU top diplomat gone for good since the European Union no longer has its own foreign policy and simply acts in line with whatever approaches are imposed by the US”.
Moscow would continue to oppose America’s attempts to “erode the principles the UN was based on” and to create a unipolar world order, the minister added.
Russia’s top diplomat also criticized Borrell for what he described as overstepping his bounds. Apart from suggesting the “idea of confiscating foreign assets”, the EU official previously said that the Ukrainian crisis “should be resolved through military means”, Lavrov said, referring to an April statement by Borrell that “this war will be won on the battlefield”, while speaking about Russia’s operation in Ukraine.
Borrell “might as well remember… he is the chief diplomat and not the military leader of the European Union”, the Russian foreign minister has said.
Following the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, Western nations froze around hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and assets owned by Russia and Russians.
The sickening Western sanctions of Russia reminds me of the Arabian Nights story of ‘Alibaba & 40 thieves’.
The culture of Western nation’s stealing money from various countries in the world seems to have become a regular practice. In my opinion, such stealing can only be compared with terrorists or Islamist jihadists robbing-off cash and valuables from people by holding them hostages. Such evil practice of the Western countries certainly is a serious type of crime. But unfortunately, in this unipolar world, where most of the media outlets have turned into loyal lapdogs of the Western policymakers no one possibly can think of freeing the world from the greedy clutches of those Alibaba and forty thieves.
In the recent times, some of the pro-Ukraine propaganda outlets are making frantic bids in branding Russia and President Vladimir Putin as “Nazi cohorts”. They are also competing in serving the evil agenda of the Clown of Kiev alias Vladimir Zelensky. But the world seems to have unfortunately forgotten the sacrifice made by the Soviet people during the Second World War.
Giving details of the sacrifices made by the Soviet Union, Russian ambassador to Bangladesh, Alexander Mantytskiy wrote in an opinion editorial:
For the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people in the fierce struggle with the fascist Germany, that intended to exterminate the USSR population, this War has become great and patriotic indeed. May 9 holiday fills our hearts with pride and sorrow. The pride and gratitude – for the feat by the multinational Soviet Union, who won the battle with fascism. The sorrow – in memory of those who stayed forever on the battlefields, were suffocated with the toxic gas in Majdanek and Auschwitz concentration camps, burnt in the stoves of Treblinka and Ravensbrück.
On May 9, 1945 the peoples of Europe for the first time in many years got an opportunity to look up in the sky without the fear owing to the feat of those, who could stop the massive, unparalleled war machine of total extermination of the racial enemies of the 3rd Reich, empowered by the foreign capital and created by the Axis powers and their Satellites under the leadership of the Nazi Germany.
About Western capitals financial support to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, Russian ambassador Alexander Mantytskiy wrote:
As for the financial support of Nazi Germany, Western capital began to cooperate with the Nazis back in the early 1930s. In 1933 Hitler came to power with the help of the Bank of England that had been financing his election campaign. The Morgan family, one of the oldest and most powerful financial groups in the United States, which had close ties with the British intelligence, generously helped Führer. The leaders of the Nazi Party received salary in the currency that was brought from Switzerland. No wonder that at the Nuremberg trials, the defendant Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank under the Hitler rule, told an American lawyer: “If you want to indict the industrialists who have helped to rearm Germany, then you must indict yourself.”
But Europe has chosen to forget about it! Unfortunately, we are compelled to note that a number of irresponsible politicians in the West have not learned the lessons of war. To achieve their own petty goals and gain few political points, they have begun to use various pseudo-scientific interpretations of those events. The Nazis are rehabilitated in many European countries, with the events in Ukraine being a vivid example of this trend.
We need not forget, when Soviet Union was fighting against Hitler and his evil Nazi forces, Ukrainian Nazis were collaborating with Hitler’s men and helped them in murdering Jews. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin is continuing battle against the ghosts of Adolf Hitler in Ukraine. Unless our conscience has gone bankrupt and we have become patients of dementia, we need to refrain from extending wrong support to Western nation’s monkey business centering Ukraine as well as mockeries of the Clown of Kiev.
Echoing the voice of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, I also want to say – the Western nations need to immediately lift sanctions on Russia and Russians, unfreeze and return their cash and properties. At the same time, I also want to remind Russians as well as wealthy Arabs who are competing in buying properties and businesses in the Western nations thus putting their cash at the risk of being robbed-off under the pretense of sanctions.
