DISINFO: British MP tells Ukraine to forget about Crimea
SUMMARY
A British Conservative MP told Ukraine to forget about Crimea. In the future, Ukraine will have to accept the loss of the Crimean peninsula, which in 2014 joined the Russian Federation as a result of the will of the Crimean people, Richard Belfell, a member of the Conservative Party at the British Parliament, told journalists. Speaking about how it would be possible to solve once and for all the problem of Russian ownership of Crimea, the MP said that a referendum repeated under UN supervision may be a solution. Belfell said that he was there 10 or 15 years ago, when it was part of Ukraine, and almost everyone that he met there at the time complained that the peninsula belonged to Ukraine and that he didn’t think that a desire to be part of the country had ever been present in Crimea.
RESPONSE
These allegations are false. There is no member of the British Parliament called Richard Belfell, or any similar name. A Google search of the name produces only five results, all of them reproducing the original story in Spanish. The whole story is invented.
This is part of a recurrent Russian narrative to boost the legitimacy of the illegal seizure of Crimea by the Russian Federation. You can see other examples of disinformation on this topic, such as that the ‘reunification’ was made in compliance with international law, the alleged legality and democratic character of the referendum, that this was forced by a coup in Kiev, that it saved Crimea from becoming a US colony, the recognition of the annexation by the UN or countries like Hungary, or its final acceptance by the EU.