Crimea referendum end result was ‘professional’ – Le Pen — RT World Information

The 2014 referendum precisely mirrored the need of the individuals dwelling in Crimea to hitch Russia, Marine Le Pen stated on Wednesday, addressing an inquiry earlier than the French Nationwide Meeting.

“I totally assist the referendum,” Le Pen informed the lawmakers. “I believe that Crimea’s residents expressed their will freely by a vote, in an effort to reunite with Russia. I believe that it was completely professional.”

Le Pen defined that her place on the peninsula has constantly remained that it was Russian lengthy earlier than it was “given away” to Ukraine “on the whim of a dictator” for sixty years, in reference to the choice of Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev to redraw inner borders in 1954. The Russian Empire had acquired Crimea from the Ottomans within the 18th century.

She additionally identified that there have been no refugees from Crimea after the referendum, that Crimean residents themselves freely informed her their choice when she visited, and that the West by no means provided to prepare one other plebiscite to confirm the results of the one they challenged.

Crimeans organized a referendum in March 2014, shortly after a US-backed coup put in a authorities of Ukrainian nationalist in Kiev. The end result confirmed overwhelming assist for rejoining Russia, which Moscow accepted. In the meantime, the Kiev authorities violently crushed dissent in Odessa and Kharkov areas, and despatched troops towards Donetsk and Lugansk.

The Nationwide Rally chief appeared earlier than a parliamentary fee investigating “Russian affect” in France, to handle accusations that her celebration took two loans from a Russian financial institution. Le Pen defined that she turned to Russian banks as a result of no French or EU banks needed to work together with her celebration, and that the purely enterprise association didn’t make her an agent of Moscow.

President Emmanuel Macron introduced up the loans to assault Le Pen in the course of the 2022 re-election marketing campaign. She misplaced the runoff by a 17-point margin, however final month’s polls confirmed her 10 factors forward of Macron in a hypothetical rematch.

Le Pen’s insistence that the Crimean return to Russia was not an “unlawful annexation,” expressed in January 2017 to France’s BFMTV and in February to CNN, earned her a ban on coming into Ukraine by the federal government in Kiev.

The present authorities has vowed to ban the Russian language and expel anybody suspected of “collaboration” with Moscow as soon as it seizes Crimea, which Kiev has introduced as one among its warfare goals. 

“As quickly as we enter, we should eradicate all the pieces Russian in Crimea,” Mikhail Podoliak, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, informed the US government-controlled RFE/RL final month.