The UN today said there was no evidence of widespread attacks on Ukraine's Russian minority, with separatists stoking fears to justify Moscow's takeover of Crimea.
"We do not have any credible evidence of issues that would justify concerns on the part of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine," said senior UN human rights official Gianni Magazzeni, releasing a report on two monitoring missions there.
Since February's ouster of pro-Moscow Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych after months of popular protests, the Kremlin repeatedly has accused Kiev of violating the rights of the ethnic Russian minority, and used this to justify its annexation of Crimea in March.
"The Russian federation is trying to shift the focus from its flagrant violation and disguise the problems in Crimea by distorting the situation of human rights in Ukraine," said Yurii Klymenko, Kiev's ambassador to the UN in Geneva.
Attention is now focused on Ukraine's Russified south and east, with a stand-off between separatist militants leading the pro-Western Kiev government to launch what it calls an anti-terrorist operation.
Ukraine has accused Russia of sending in barely-disguised special forces to lead the militants, while Moscow, far more powerful militarily, has warned Kiev against a crackdown and says the country is close to civil war.
Covering the period up to April 2, before the spike in violence in eastern Ukraine, the report said situation was "particularly tense" and that ethnic Russians did not trust the Kiev government.
But "while there were some attacks against the ethnic Russian community, these were neither systematic nor widespread", it said, also pointing to allegations that trouble was being stoked by outsiders, including from Russia.
"The situation in Ukraine is not such that would justify action from any one country," said Magazzeni.
Russia and pro-Moscow figures in Ukraine have played up the role of far-right groups in the anti-Yanukovych protests, some of which glorify World War II-era Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.
While condemning the extremists, Magazzeni said that "underlying human rights violations" under a string of Ukrainian governments, compounded by Yanukovych's bloody but failed crackdown, sparked the protests.
The report said fears of the far right were "disproportionate" and had been used "systematically used to create a climate of fear and insecurity" in Crimea, with Moscow sending troops, paving the way for last month's annexation after a separatist referendum condemned by the international community.
