OREANDA-NEWS. The UN General Assembly adopted the Ukrainian resolution on the “militarization of Crimea and Sevastopol, as well as parts of the Black and Azov Seas.” This was reported on Twitter by the mission of Ukraine to the United Nations. The resolution’s text has not been officially published yet.

63 countries voted “aye” – three less than last year. 19 states (Armenia, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Korea, Philippines, Russia, Serbia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe) opposed the resolution. 66 countries abstained.

Oleg Nikolenko, the press secretary of the Ukrainian mission to the UN, wrote on Facebook that the resolution proposed by Kiev requires Russia to withdraw troops from the peninsula. In addition, Ukraine wants to return military equipment and weapons seized from the ships of the Ukrainian Navy, which participated in the provocation in the Kerch Strait in 2018. The resolution says that the Russian military presence and obstruction of international navigation in the Black and Azov Seas region negatively affect the socio-economic situation in the coastal regions of Ukraine. Kiev advises representatives of foreign states to refrain from visits to Crimea and Sevastopol without coordination with Ukrainian authorities.

Last year, the UN General Assembly adopted a similar resolution. As the Russian Foreign Ministry noted, such initiatives were used as one more method of pressure on Moscow and showed that a campaign against Russia was carried out. According to the official representative of the Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, the adopted resolution served as a screen for failed domestic policy of Ukraine and did not contribute to the resolution of the crisis in the country.