Abstracts for the statement of A.V. Tarasov Dear participants of the 7th UN Forum on Minority Issues! I am the human rights activist from Ukraine – the only place in Europe where the continued widespread violence and atrocity crimes targeted against minorities still prevail, and where the number of casualties of the last six months of civil war amounts to 20 000 people, according to various sources. First of all, let me thank the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for the efforts to resolve the humanitarian crisis in the East of Ukraine. Unfortunately, the end of this crisis still seems a long way off. Therefore, we would like to call for enhancement of the activities undertaken and building up the international community to end the armed confrontation. One of the factors that lead to the crisis in the East Ukraine was (is) past and present discrimination against the Russian minority in Ukraine. Public authorities of Ukraine systematically ignored the peculiarities of ethnic and linguistic differences in the country regions. Representatives of the international organisations refused to notice that either. Meanwhile, members of Ukraine's Russian-speaking minority were constantly facing violation of their rights due to discrimination on the basis of language. Inequitable distribution of resources has formed the economic basis of the interethnic conflict; while a large part of the GDP was being produced in the Russian-speaking industrial regions of the South-eastern Ukraine, the standard of living of the residents of this region was lower than in many other parts of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the issues of national and linguistic discrimination in Ukraine did not acutely float to the surface at the time. Sociologists reassuringly attributed them to the secondary issues of citizens’ concern. The human rights activists saw this situation differently, having a clear understanding that the accumulated problems would lead inevitably to an outbreak sooner or later. The question was only when, and in what form?