Poroshenko orders convening NSDC meeting on Crimea's reintegration

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has ordered preparing a special session of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council to update a "strategy of Crimea's reintegration."

"To update our strategy of Crimea's reintegration into Ukraine, I've ordered today that a special session of the National Security and Defense Council be prepared. I expect the Cabinet of Ministers to submit a detailed timetable of measures to defend Ukraine's national interests in international courts and hold the aggressor state liable before both Ukraine as a state and Ukrainian private companies," Poroshenko said in an address related to the second anniversary of beginning of applying counter measures to Russia's occupation of Crimea on Friday.

Poroshenko has said that Ukraine doesn't recognize and will never recognize de jure those citizens of the peninsula, who received Russian passports, as Russian citizens. "These are not Russian citizens who now live in Crimea, it is populated exclusively by the citizens of Ukraine, these are our people living on our territory, which is temporarily occupied," he stressed.

The president also listed priority tasks, namely the protection of rights and freedoms of the residents of Crimea, support of any sources of "legal resistance to the occupying Russian authorities and its local puppet goblins [Goblin is the nickname of Crimea's de facto head Sergei Aksyonov]."

The president stressed that Ukraine would resolutely protect collective rights of cultural and religious communities on the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, in particular the rights of ethnic Ukrainians, as well as indigenous peoples: Crimean Tatars, Crimean Karaites, other ethnic minorities, all Ukrainian patriots, who didn't accept an occupation and resist in any possible way.

"To protect their rights, including their right to a protest, we'll broadly involve international organizations," he added.

Moreover, according to the head of state, Kyiv will take measures for the issue of the illegal occupation of the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol as an unprecedented after the Second World War to remain on the agenda of European and world policy.

"The main prerequisite for reintegration as a temporarily occupied territory is an advanced development of economy of Ukraine, its democratic institutions and mechanisms for the protection of human rights, an improvement in living standards," the president stressed.