DISINFO: Russia sanctions kill livestock in Finland
SUMMARY
Sanctions against Russia announced by Finland are the cause of the farmers’ crisis. Russia sanctions are killing Finnish livestock. It is false to state that Crimea was annexed. It was a democratic and geopolitical reaction by the autonomous Crimean administration to the coup d’état in Kyiv, which forced Ukraine’s Russian population to respond to the anti-Russian security threat.
RESPONSE
No evidence given. It was Russia that banned the import of most of the food products from the EU, US, and other countries after Western countries introduced sanctions in response to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and its deliberate destabilisation of Ukraine. Farmers in Finland are indeed facing economic problems, but the food import ban by Russia is only one of the reasons. The producer price for milk has decreased at the same time as energy and fertiliser prices have gone up. The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has stated that "the information available suggests that the situation within the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol amounts to an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation". This international armed conflict began at the latest on 26 February 2014 when the Russian Federation deployed members of its armed forces to gain control over parts of the Ukrainian territory without the consent of the Ukrainian government. The European Union stated in July 2014 that "arms and fighters continue flowing into Ukraine from the Russian Federation." Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted Russia's military presence in Ukraine in 2015. Human rights missions that travelled to Ukraine in 2014 did not find any evidence that the Russian minority was in danger: 1. The Advisory Committee’s Ad-hoc Report on the situation of national minorities in Ukraine, adopted on 1 April 2014, Council of Europe; 2. Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 15 June 2014; 3. Statement by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities on her Recent Visit to Ukraine, 4 April 2014. MV-lehti's editor-in-chief resided for years in occupied Donetsk and founded another media outlet there. In the "About" section of the website the war in Ukraine is described as a "civil war", which is recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation. See the archived version of the web page here.